


Lost and Lingering

by glittergritted



Series: Ashla [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rise of Empire Era - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brother-Sister Relationships, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied Relationships, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, No Sex, POV Alternating, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:00:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 25,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4179057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittergritted/pseuds/glittergritted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>- 30 BBY & 23 BBY -</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Saul

Saul only stopped running when he fell. Blood trickled down into his eyes and threw him off-kilter, and he tore a large, bloody hole in his work trousers on the pavement. He groaned, gritting his teeth as he struggled to get back on his feet. His injured knee shook under his weight and buckled. Exhausted and dizzy with dehydration, he was now blinded by his own blood. He heaved breaths with his mouth agape, tasting metal. The crisp air stung at his wounds and his knee throbbed with new pain.  
  
His heart pounding, Saul brought himself to rest on his unhurt leg and wiped at his eyes with the backs of his painful, shaky hands. His palms were sticky and wet, and they ached so badly that the action of flexing their muscles them made his throat close.  
  
When he could see again, he blinked hard as he made out Aldera's primary spaceport. Light poured out into the night from its hemispherical docking buildings, and he thought he could make out a distant voice from inside. Saul pivoted to look behind himself, urgency and fear tearing at the inside of his rib cage. Not a sound. Not a movement. He had run all the way to the outskirts, and he began to feel it as the adrenalin wore off. Gentle sounds of rippling lake water touched his ears as the ringing stopped.  
  
Still, his neck tingled with the sensation of being followed, and he couldn't trust the shadows not to be hiding anything.  
  
But no matter how hard he tried to see someone, there was no one. No footsteps, no sound at all, save for breezes running through plants and chirping orokeets.  
  
Navy eyes flickered upward to the silhouette of the Royal Palace; his heart caught. He looked at it for a long moment, imagining. Tears pooled in his eyes and blurred the night. He heaved a sob and looked away, curling his hands into fists against the ground. Saul remained there for only a moment longer before he made a decision.  
  
He shoved himself to his feet, groaning with the effort, and ran lamely toward the spaceport on empty lungs. The lights hurt his eyes after being so accustomed to darkness, and once he reached a lit stretch of pavement before the various docking bays he took a moment to lean against a cache of gray supply crates, catching his breath and rubbing his eyes as they adjusted.  
  
“Can I help you?” a soft male voice called from across the way.  
  
Saul jumped, gripping the crates behind him. “Who—” His throat was so dry it hurt to talk. He winced and swallowed. “Who are you?” He was surprised at how fragile his own voice sounded.  
  
A Human emerged into better lighting—a boy a couple of years older than Saul with slick black hair, tan skin, and big russet eyes. Those eyes widened as he got a better look at the visitor. Saul must have looked worse than he had given thought to consider: Blood caked his cheeks and the sides of his eyes, tinted his teeth pink, and continued to glisten damp in long slits down and across his face. His black curls stuck to it, and tears mixed with it to create slightly lighter streams down his face. His hands were covered in red, too.  
  
“Your Highness,” said the boy, his voice gaining some weight, reaching a hand toward Saul. He was only a couple of inches shorter than the prince. “What happened? Shall I comm—”  
  
“You have to help me,” Saul interrupted, gripping the boy's dark blue-clad shoulders. “Y-y-you have to get me out of here. I need a ship, I have to leave.”  
  
The boy was given pause, but didn't hesitate to begin guiding Saul closer to the bays, if not mostly out instinct and acknowledgment of his royal authority. “You're not fit to fly yourself, Your Highness. I can tell that much.”  
  
Saul did not deny it. His head began to swim, the world swaying back and forth and left to right with every step he took. He was _so, so, so_ tired. The inside of his head felt like it was burning, and his chest continued to heave with each breath. He could hardly walk anymore, let alone fly a ship. But he _had_ to, he had to leave, he had to get out.  
  
“Your Highness, you should see a medic,” said the boy, stopping. Saul's eyes flickered over his face and fell upon his identification tag. His name was Taran, printed on his chest in slender Aurebesh characters. “I'm the only one manning the bays this late; I should comm—”  
  
Panic made a spot deep between Saul's ribs shock with pain. Suddenly, he looked back toward the entrance of the starport, fabricating phantom sounds of footsteps so well he believed himself. He gripped Taran's shoulders tighter, stopping his sentence short. “Please!” he said, almost crying. “I-I-I have to get out of here, I have to leave! He'll find me here. I can't go back there, I can't—”  
  
Saul fell quiet again, remembering how the dagger was bloody before it had touched him. The man's clothes were wet and his face was splotched with blood, too. He had thought of those things while he ran, and it nearly made him falter. The man at the entrance to the gardens had a blaster pistol, but didn't move to pick it up after Saul had knocked it from his hands. He let him go, encouraged him even.  
  
He had looked scared, too.  
  
Saul couldn't go back, he wouldn't. In the haze of his pain and tire the palace faded from the forefront of his mind, and all he could think about were the phantom footsteps. So real, too real, _must_ be real.  
  
Taran's eyes widened and he paused again, looking into Saul's eyes and getting a faint chill along his back. Whatever had happened to the Prince of Alderaan, it was too urgent to comm a medic.  
  
“I have a personal transport in Dock Nine. I can take you as far as Kattada.”  
  
Dock Nine housed Taran's _Baudo_ -class star yacht, a well taken care of vessel of gray and dark gold, slender and sleek and as spotless as though it had never been flown. As Taran lowered the boarding ramp with secondhand urgency, he found himself looking in the direction of the Royal Palace, where Saul kept glancing.  
  
“Should I comm the queen, Your Highness?” Taran asked, ushering Saul up the ramp and closing it behind them. Saul didn't answer, he only took minuscule steps across the yacht's lounge. “I think—”  
  
“Just hurry, _please_ ,” Saul said, gripping the side of a sofa secured to the bulkhead.  
  
A dull ache in the back of his head made him wince and he suddenly thought of Jemmila. He felt like he may collapse as a deep dread cemented itself in his core. _Oh, no, not her—nonono, not Jem. Not her._  
  
Flakes of dried blood were left on the light tan fabric when Taran began guiding him into a narrow corridor. The pain in his head and the dread it brought with it both remained. Jemmila's bright cobalt eyes invaded his mind's eye, and he again expected to faint.  
  
“Come sit with me in the cockpit.” Saul's arm trembled beneath Taran's hands, and with no sound in the air around them his uneven breathing was audible. Taran placed Saul in the navigator's chair and began warming up the ship. His gut was tight with mingling confusion and fear, and he kept glancing back to the cuts on Saul's face. “I'm sorry, Your Highness, but what _happened_?” he asked, swiveling the chair around.  
  
Saul looked up at him, his eyes still wide and scared, flickering back and forth between Taran's face and the view outside the transparisteel viewport. His hands were resting palms-up on his knees, and Taran's stomach turned at the cuts there: Thin horizontal lines across his palms and his middle knuckles—like he had gripped a blade. The ambient sounds of a starship's interior now filled the atmosphere, adding welcome background noise.  
  
“I don't know,” Saul said quietly, more tears welling. He thought about the bloody dagger again, and the man's red hair that seemed to match his weapon in the moonlight. He thought about his mother and father in turn, and little Rose, and a thick ball of wax formed in his throat, choking a groan. “I don't know.”


	2. Saul

“They say Haleoda is a _haven_ for smugglers. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe I just need to read up more on what happens on places outside of the Alderaan system.”  
  
Taran Ardana had not stopped talking in the last standard hour. Throughout gathering bandages and solvents, cleaning Saul's wounds, apologizing when the prince would wince at the touch of a cloth, and taking the ship out of hyperspace when they entered the Kattada system, Taran maintained a steady stream of smalltalk. Saul, on the contrary, had not spoken since they left the Alderaan system other than to give quiet thanks when his wounds were dressed with extra care and when small rations of water were given.  
  
Taran was scared, full to bursting with questions. He concealed his fear with energy, hoping to mask it well enough so that he himself would forget it. Saul hadn't offered—hadn't been _able_ to offer—any answers. Whenever he tried to make himself speak, his throat would close up and dry out, his lips pressing together in tandem with his eyelids.  
  
He couldn't be blamed, Taran knew. Whatever had happened, he decided halfway through the trip that he didn't want to know. He decided three fourths of the way through the trip that he probably _did_ know, and it had instilled a thick, slow chill in him. A half-frozen chunk of ice had broken off of a glacier and slowly slid through his diaphragm.  
  
Taran looked back to where Saul was sitting in the navigator's chair, eyes glazed yet filled with tumult, and wanted to ask. The question bubbled up at the base of his throat and caught there, only a small squeak escaping his lips before he stopped himself. Saul looked up at him, slow and somber, like an animal awoken from sleep, having heard the noise. Instead of voicing his suspicion, Taran cracked a half smile and said, “We'll be there in a couple standard hours.” Saul had only nodded and looked out into the blue of hyperspace, his brow heavy.  
  
“It's very beautiful—a tropical climate, lots of water. The Haleoda spaceport is mostly comprised of glass domes and bridges. There are docking platforms that are accessible via elevators, so don't worry about that. Nice people, apparently, but again, plenty of smugglers. At least they're not pirates, huh?”  
  
Kattada was a relative paradise. Sprawling oceans glistened crystalline beneath the bright morning sun, and the tropical forests behind Haleoda were impossibly green. Both Taran had Saul had been there before, but both boys were just as struck with its beauty as they had been the first time.  
  
Taran slowed his star yacht in close proximity to the spaceport to open a comm channel. “Captain Ardana of the _Baudo_ -class star yacht _Triplehorn_ requesting permission to dock.”  
  
After the Triplehorn mountains, Saul recognized silently. He also recognized how Taran's long-winded introduction gave the distinct impression that this had been his first time comming for clearance to land.  
  
A tinny female voice responded a couple moments later, the time between request and answer presumably filled by the woman checking _Triplehorn_ 's ship ID. “Permission granted, Captain Ardana. You may land in Dock Four. Expect someone there to charge your docking fee.”  
  
“Thank you, miss.”  
  
Taran guided _Triplehorn_ into the designated docking bay, leaving the engine running idle as he unbuckled his crash webbing. Saul mirrored the action, standing up slowly. His muscles were stiff and tight, and his hands hurt more than ever now that the pain-quelling solvent that Taran had administered had worn off.  
  
“Why don't you sit in the lounge for a minute?” Taran asked, putting a gentle hand on Saul's shoulder. “Once I pay the fee I'll come back and refresh your bandages.”  
  
Saul nodded, giving a thankful yet hollow upward quirk of his lips. He managed his way to the lounge, sitting down heavily on the light-colored couch as Taran lowered the boarding ramp. The docking bay was a large circular platform raised high above the sea. He could hear water splashing against the support frame below, and the sight of rolling hills and warm forests crested by puffy white clouds delighted him. Above was an expanse of bright blue sky that stretched beyond the ocean's horizon.  
  
He heard mechanical whirs and the opening of an automated door to his right and turned from the sea view. A short-statured Human female with sandy hair, clad in a light gray uniform that showed little of her tanned skin, strode toward him, holding a small device in her left arm.  
  
“Captain Ardana?” she called out.  
  
They met in the middle, Taran smiling warmly despite the cold still present within him. “That's me. How much?”  
  
Small crinkles appeared at the corners of the woman's blue eyes as she returned Taran's smile. She seemed to be charmed by him. Her identification tag read _Raena_ in bold-faced Aurebesh. “Twenty credits base plus five for each local hour you remain docked.” A practiced line, repeated a number of times beyond counting.  
  
“I'll only be staying a few minutes.” Taran pulled out his credit chip from an interior pocket of his uniform, handing it to Raena.  
  
She swiped the chip through a slit in the top of the device, tapping a few buttons and charging his account twenty credits. “There you are,” she said.  
  
“Thank you.” Taran pocketed his credit chip and gave another smile. “Have a nice day.”  
  
He walked swiftly back up the boarding ramp, finding Saul where he had left him, looking at his boots. Taran swiped up his medpac on his way to the couch. He slid behind the oval-shaped table, scooting next to Saul and opening the supplies. The former volunteered his hands first. The cuts had stopped bleeding, but Taran could tell that they would scar.  
  
After he finished cleaning and redressing Saul's face, hands, and knee, he cleansed his own hands with a sanitary wipe and closed the medpac. He went through every motion carefully and slowly, dragging out the time they took purely out of avoidance of the inevitable.  
  
“Are you sure about this?” Taran asked. “Just—you just want me to leave you here?”  
  
Saul nodded subtly. “Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure,” he answered, quiet. He met Taran's eyes. “I can't go back there.”  
  
Taran let out a long, quiet breath. “What should I do when I get back? What should I tell them?”  
  
Saul thought for a long moment, closing his tired eyes. Had he slept yet? “They probably know what happened by now,” he said, his voice crackly against his throat. “Don't tell them where I am. They're all dead already.”  
  
Taran was struck silent. He blinked, looking deeper into the prince's eyes as if he could somehow break through the navy blue layers to find a different answer. “Wh— . . . what? You can't know that for sure. Can you? D-do you know that for sure?”  
  
Saul shook his head, though not in uncertainty. “He had a knife. It was already—it was already dirty, they have to be dead.” He was trying to convince himself more than Taran—that much he wouldn't have denied even then—but what was there to tell him otherwise? Who was to say that that man hadn't remained there, waiting for him? Or that he had tracked the starship and followed him?  
  
Suddenly he grew anxious, sucking in a breath and standing up. Taran blinked again, uneasy yet.  
  
“I just have to go,” Saul said, wrapping his arms around himself to act as a barrier against the unseen. “I don't know where. I can't stay here, either.” Talking still hurt, but he canceled out the pain.  
  
A ball of pity sank low in Taran's stomach. He stood, his legs shaking slightly, and pulled out several fifty-credit ingots from an inner compartment of his uniform. He always kept cash on his person as a precaution. “You'll need money. Do you have any on you?”  
  
Saul didn't notice the money, only the warm tropical air wafting in through the hallway that led to the boarding ramp. He absentmindedly patted his trouser and jacket pockets. “No.”  
  
“Here—take these.” He took Saul's hand in his and gently placed the silver ingots on the bandaged palm. The room smelled heavily of bacta, and the aroma mixed with slight dehydration made Taran's head go light for a few seconds. “That should be enough to get a ride someplace. Refugee ships are always cheaper, if you can find one. And hey, you're the Prince of Alderaan: You could probably get passage anywhere in the galaxy for free if you wanted.” Taran tried for a lighthearted chuckle, standing with his arms akimbo in an effort to appear casual. His breath caught, tapering the withering laughter off with a sharp edge. “I'm sorry I can't take you farther myself.”  
  
Saul shook his head, looking down at the credits and touching each one with the tip of his index finger. “That's okay,” he said, swallowing hard. When he winced, Taran shot over to a rations cupboard fastened to the bulkhead, producing a clear rectangular water bottle. He handed it to Saul, who pocketed the credits and drank greedily. When half of the water was gone, he turned back to his newfound yet short-lived friend, lips shiny like dewy leaves. “I'm sorry you had to do this. I shouldn't have put all this . . . all this pressure on you.”  
  
“Hey, no, it's okay,” Taran said. “If what you say is true—” His heart caught at the thought of it, as it had so many times already. He hardly knew what happened, but still knew more than he wanted to. He supposed he would know very soon. “Don't apologize. As long as you're safe, that's all that matters, right?”  
  
Saul didn't answer, recapping the bottle for something to do.  
  
“I won't tell anybody where you are, okay? I won't. If they ask, I'll say I was going on a little pleasure flight because business was slow and I never saw you. A shoddy excuse, but the best one I've got.” Inwardly, Taran made himself a different promise: _If the royal family_ is _dead, I'll keep my word. If someone wanted them dead, then that someone will want Prince Saul dead, too. But if they're not—even if just one of them is alive—then they deserve to know where he is. Or, at least, where I saw him last._  
  
“Thank you,” Saul said, meaning it. There was still acute anxiety behind his appreciative gaze, and so Taran decided that it was time to lead him outside.  
  
When Saul Seeker was met with the humid warmth of late morning Haleoda, he breathed a deep, involuntary breath. He amount of water in the air made him feel like he was swimming in it. “I don't remember it being so humid.”  
  
“I guess I've been here more often than you have; I don't much notice it.”  
  
The pair walked silently into the transparisteel elevator, Saul dizzying at the clear floor. He nary paid mind to the scenery around him; he could only think of Jemmila when he saw the water reflecting blue, Rosalie when he heard the flowing of a waterfall to his right, Tura and Marich when he saw the forests and jungles. White birds squawked and flew in scattered flocks overhead.  
  
When the elevator doors slid open, they walked over the water on a walkway that led into a cavernous hourglass-shaped building with bronze-colored panes. The glass walls let in copious sunlight. People bustled all around them, some sparing glances at Saul's bandages, and some sparing glances at the Prince of Alderaan in and of himself. Announcements called out from concealed speakers, grandiose and enthused. There were two long, large segmented desks with Humans behind them, either tapping away at computers or tending to travelers.  
  
“There's a cantina in one of the buildings off of this one. Called the Golden Palm, I think. That's where a lot of the smugglers congregate, from what I hear. You can find a more inexpensive ride with them than if you talked to an actual employee here.” Again, Taran tried to lend a lighthearted lilt to his tone and failed. “Plus, it's more discrete that way.”  
  
Saul reached into his pocket and felt the credits, reassuring himself. His heart beat faster every second, and the hand that held the water bottle would have shaken if he hadn't held it against abdomen. “Thank you, again. I could never repay you.”  
  
_There may be more truth to that than the expression originally intended_. Taran smiled gently. “You're welcome, Your Highness. Travel safely. And don't shy away from bargaining; save as many credits as you can.”  
  
Saul gave a thankful, almost imperceptible simper. After only two steps in the direction of the building's central directory, he turned. “If any of them are okay,” he started, before choking on the words and having to start over. “If any of them are okay, just tell them. In private. Don't tell anybody else, or make an—or make an announcement.” Tears welled at the corners of Saul's eyes. He looked away from Taran and toward one of the curved glass walls to blink them away. When he looked back, Taran's brown eyes were glistening. “If he knows—he can't know. He probably does.”  
  
“Who?” Taran found himself asking.  
  
“I don't know. I didn't— . . . recognize him. But if any of them are all right—just tell _them_ , alone. Okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Taran answered quickly. “I won't tell anybody but them.”  
  
_If there is a_ them _at all_ , Saul thought, and his heart squeezed so tightly he thought it might burst.  
  
After a beat, Taran nodded. “Better get going, then. Be safe, Your Highness. I'll make sure everything is tended to as best I can.” Any fragment of reassurance he could offer Saul, he wanted to give.  
  
“Thank you,” Saul said, clutching the plastic bottle with both hands. “For my life.”  
  
Taran steeled himself against any further dampness in his eyes. He nodded briskly. “Of course.”  
  
They nodded a final time, and parted ways. By the time Taran had left the hourglass building, Saul's breath was too short to keep a steady pace. He rested on a bench for what felt like a few minutes but what ended up being two standard hours. His body wanted him to cry, but he held off the urge by reminding himself of all of the eyes on and around him. With every inch of him feeling leaden, he pushed himself off of the bench and made his way to the Golden Palm, following the directory's guidance.  
  
Aside from half a bottle of water and a handful of credit ingots clinking in his pocket, Saul was alone. With every step, the ache inside of him grew more profound. The utter, black absence of connection. He felt like he was a water barge towing heavy, frayed cables behind him. He clung to the bottle like a child clung to a stuffed animal, stepping into the well-lit cantina and thus stepping into his new life alone. Seventeen years old and completely alone in the galaxy, his only friend going back up the transparisteel elevator to return to Alderaan.  
  
Hundreds of lively beings around him, but his body, mind, and soul were in a despair so deep he had to duck into the nearest refresher to let out wracking sobs. He cried until he threw up and his head felt swollen and painful. When he could stand again, he rinsed his face with cold water and looked at his reflection in the mirror. Red, puffy eyes underlined thickly with dark circles looked back at him. The water darkened the bacta patches slightly, making them transparent enough to see the fast-healing cuts beneath them. The dressings on his hands were the same, except gauze covered those patches, so the water affected them less.  
  
Saul looked at himself again and breathed deeply. Almost every part of his body hurt to some degree, but his mind was clearer now than it had been. His paranoia had faded most of the way, but fear lingered, persistent, enough to keep him from questioning himself. He made himself take a sip of water, washing the taste of bile away, and afterward he looked back in the mirror. His stubble was growing in slightly, and just the action of blinking at himself made him unbelievably tired.  
  
Saul felt at the credits again, feeling their smoothness and reassuring himself one more time not to go running after Taran Ardana.


	3. Rosalie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Verena Solaris does not belong to me! She belongs to my good friend Lexi ([elxiamidala](http://elxiamidala.tumblr.com) on tumblr) and is entirely her creation.

It had started out as a feeling. An inkling. A small pinprick at the edge of her consciousness. Pale light at the end of a tunnel. She couldn't grasp it, and every time she got close enough to reach for it, the feeling evaded her. Disappeared back into the darkness.  
  
At first, it had only come to her in meditation, when her mind could freely expand beyond the immediate without getting pulled back by harrowing wars or malignancy. After a while, once she had gotten acquainted with it through her hours of chasing and wondering and curiosity, Rosalie knew that it was a person. The distant, untouchable beacon of a _living_ being, not just a feeling. It didn't take long for her to know who the person was. When she did, she came out of the session of meditation in a slight sweat, her eyes falling upon a tangle of vines in the Temple Gardens when they opened, distant sounds of birds and the warmth of artificial daylight welcoming her into a new world in which her half-brother was alive.  
  
She had never seen him killed as she had the others, only assumed that he had been. When her world shattered and fell apart, she could only believe that he had been one of the pieces. Broken and jagged, bled out and cold and cut open. But when she felt him in the Force, his presence was warm and whole and utterly alive. Distant, faint, and so feather-light in her mind that she had almost convinced herself that she was manufacturing it for herself subconsciously, but _alive_.  
  
Rosalie had left the Gardens in a hurry and made her way to the Archives. She practically slid in front of a computer terminal and looked him up on the HoloNet. For the first time in two standard years, she allowed herself to look at that picture of him—the one captured on his and Jemmila's seventeenth birthday, dressed all in white, black curls uncharacteristically out of his face, looking away from the imager, eyebrows and corners of lips ever so slightly raised in amusement at something unseen, headed by the four Basic words ALDERAANI PRINCE PRESUMED DEAD in light blue Aurebesh. It was a news article, made seven years after the Massacre of the Aldera Royal Palace, so it had been dubbed. Seven years was generally how long it took for them to stop looking.  
  
The galaxy was seven years late to presuming Saul Seeker dead, anyway. Rosalie had beaten them to it. Seeing that article had been the unnecessary confirmation that she wasn't alone in her assumption. Dead and butchered and likely not even buried, left somewhere he wouldn't be found, his skin falling away and his bones bleaching in the sun, if sunlight could even reach the place where their family's murderer had left him.  
  
But no. No, not even close. The pinprick, nagging and pinching and tugging at the very edge of her, was her brother. Saul, who taught her how to ride horses and how to bake, who was endearingly awful at braiding hair. Hope bloomed in her chest, so intense that she had let out an audible breath.  
  
“Hey, you okay, Rose?” She had looked vaguely concerned, but mostly inquisitive. “It's almost time for lessons; you're always in the Training Hall early.”  
  
The voice had drawn Rosalie out of the depths of Saul's blue flat-holo eyes. She closed the article before Verena Solaris had gotten close enough to see it. Rosalie couldn't help but smile as she swiveled the chair to face her friend. “I'm fine.”  
  
The other Padawan cocked an eyebrow, feeling the stirring and excitement in Rosalie's sense. “You sure about that? Something you wanna tell me?”  
  
Rosalie stood, habitually straightening out her robes and shaking her head. “No, Vee, everything's fine.”  
  
Verena stood her ground, her big green eyes flickering about the populated cavern of the Temple Archives in a display of mock mischief. “Something you don't want to say in front of everybody else?” she asked, slightly hushed.  
  
Rosalie snorted, placing a gentle hand on the other's arm as she walked toward the exit. “Maybe. I'll let you know.”  
  
In response, Verena clicked her tongue, observing the silver's expression sidelong. There was an effervescence to Rosalie that day that caught her attention and didn't let go. “How cryptic of you.”  
  
Rosalie indulged a small smile. Her voice affected a warm-honey viscosity, thick with a sudden longing. “I'll tell you when I figure it out.”

* * *

_Remember him. Remember what is presence felt like—not in the air or the atmosphere, but in the Force. You didn't know you were feeling it then, but you can find it now._  
  
The young Jedi had slinked through the winding dirt and stone paths beyond the sturdy wooden entrance to the Room of a Thousand Fountains, seeking out a clearing she favored for its overhanging hydenock tree and sprinkling of Endor clovers among the grass.  
  
Gentle streams trickled lightly over smooth stones underneath her feet as she passed over a bridge, quick-stepped and lithe. Fragrances of exotic plantlife originating from thousands of worlds across the galaxy permeated around her, and the distant splashes of unsourced waterfalls provided a relaxing soundtrack when combined with the rustling of overhead leaves.  
  
Seven stories tall with an illusion of a sky above and no walls visible behind thick layers of greenery, the vast chamber was designed to give those who sought contemplation amid peace and tranquility an environment completely separated from that of the planet-wide metropolis that surrounded the Jedi Temple on all sides. Neon lights and air acrid with pollution were shut out by artificial sunlight and gentle breezes, leaving only the cooling balm of the Force and a Jedi’s own mind to fill in the blank spaces with whatever they needed or desired.  
  
Troubled minds always found their way to the Room of a Thousand Fountains, so Grand Master Yoda theorized. No different was the case this time, as Rosalie Seeker sat cross-legged beneath the vibrant red canopy of the hydenock tree, her back against its curved sienna trunk. It was one of many the spanning garden had, but Rosalie had come to prefer this one in particular.  
  
She sat in a meditative trance for a long time, enveloping herself in the Force, letting it penetrate her being and release her thoughts into puzzle pieces before her mind’s eye so she could more easily decipher them. Her muscles were relaxed, but her nails dug into the dark fabric that covered her knees, as though she was grasping at the images that danced before her.  
  
_When he smiled big enough, his nose would crinkle and his eyes would squint._  
  
_When you spoke to him he listened like your words were more important than the Chancellor of the Republic’s. And to him, they probably were._  
  
_He always smelled like citrus, since it was his self-imposed chore to harvest ripe fruits from the citrus trees and blend the rinds with other herbs, fruits, and flowers to make tea. Tea was his second favorite hobby behind horseback riding. Sometimes he would purchase ingredients from merchants and bring them samples of what he had made out of them._  
  
_His hugs were always warm and safe-feeling, like he was guarding you with his life._  
  
_He was tall like a bronzium statue, though he never made you feel smaller than him._  
  
Saul Seeker had been one of the kindest souls in the galaxy, and now he was lost among nebulae and stardust, potentially hiding on any world in any system in the Core Worlds, Expansion Region, Mid Rim, Outer Rim. At least she hoped he could be so close; to think he was in some uncharted corner of the Unknown Territories or Wild Space scared his baby sister. She didn’t want to think of him among gangs of smugglers and dealers, making credits off of spice or worse, or having credits being made off of himself.  
  
There was no doubt he had gotten away, for when she thought of Jemmila, Marich, or Tura their imprints all rang the same: grayed out; halted; dead. Saul’s, on the other hand, was like a distant star, glowing with life and heat and energy. A beacon of brightness, whispering in her ear to seek it out among the billions of flecks of light in the sky.  
  
Rosalie tried to remember what it was like to be around him, what it felt like to have the weight of his protective hand on her shoulder. What it was like to have him hold the reins of Yessa the first few times she rode her, expertly providing guidance and reassurance. Warmth spread throughout her at the memories. She thought of the soft kiss he had placed on her scraped cheek one day, careful not to mess up her braids too much when he mussed her hair.  
  
If she encompassed enough of the Force around her mind, let it slink between her mental barriers like gentle, cool water, Rosalie could feel all of those sensations over again. His imprint in the Force grew larger in her vision, bolder and more opaque, and with its newfound visibility came a curious clarity.  
  
She expanded her thought further over days and weeks, dedicating time each morning before breakfast and each evening after training. She envisioned the galaxy as it was shown on typical pilot-standard starmaps: from above with the galaxy itself lying flat, digital tendrils extending in curvy lines across the transparent blue field of stars, nebulae, dust, and asteroids, signifying trade routes and passages. Bright dots signified key systems, with their names displayed above them. Lighter patches signified clusters of systems or entire regions dominated by a single figure or group. Hutt Space. The Hapes Cluster.  
  
_Where would he have gone in this big knotted mess of space?_  
  
It was likely that he had traveled as a refugee, as Rosalie couldn’t imagine Saul coming into a lot of money on his way to find transportation, unless he stole some. The idea was preposterous, so she dismissed it immediately.  
  
It was a wild bantha chase. Saul had disliked cold despite his tolerance for it, so would it be someplace warm like Tatooine or Corellia? He liked forests, so would it be Endor or Yavin 4? He enjoyed visiting marketplaces, so was he living a simple life selling loose leaf teas to patrons in Theed markets on Naboo? It was impossible to tell, his sense only guiding Rosalie’s mind so far.  
  
She continued to dig deeper, sink her teeth further into the clues, concealing them from even her master and roommate. She was holding onto a dream of a promise of a hint, but she had something to cling to, to give her hope that one of those little dots of light was her brother’s blood still running strong in his veins.


	4. Rosalie

Rosalie Seeker could scarcely believe herself. She sat back in the small cockpit of the starfighter, smoothing her fingers over her hair, still damp from her earlier shower. She had lied to the High Council before, there was no doubt in that. A lie large enough to warrant her expulsion, yet still she felt no remorse. Why did this one affect her with such nervousness?  
  
As she made her hand reach forward and fire up the ship's engines, she got the sudden urge to comm Asrai'ev and make him tell her to stop. He would have, prompted or not—she could count on that. She could see his face in her mind's eye, hear his voice speak the doubts she already felt. If he had been the one to say _stay_ , she would have. Not that any of it would be possible in that moment. Somewhere off in the Mid Rim or Outer, on assignment and out of reach, he was unfairly unaware of Rosalie's plans, no different than those asleep in the dormitories. The selfish, willing dishonesty of this trip wasn't comparable to the dutiful secrecy of the work of Shadows, but Rosalie worked hard to convince herself of such as she fastened her crash webbing.  
  
The console display lit up, the engines idle. Rosalie shut her eyes, sighing a long breath, leaving the comlink on her belt alone and untouched. When she opened her eyes again, she was focused on programming in the coordinates for the Tyrius system.

* * *

She sat there for a long time, watching the opening of the Temple hangar that let out into Coruscant's neon night. Below the Padawan's booted feet, the deck hummed gently with the vibrations of prepped engines. At length, she adjusted in her seat to more comfortably reach the controls, feeling a stiffness in her hips. She had been sitting like that for a long time, watching. Her heart beat hard in her chest, though not quickly. She could feel the pulses in the base of her throat and in the tips of her fingers.  
  
She ran through calming breathing exercises for the umpteenth time, knowing that she couldn't pilot a ship with trembling hands. _One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . ._  
  
Jedi were known for their calm, stony demeanor in even the most strenuous circumstances, but that was a skill Rosalie had yet to master. She needed it now most of all; today was the first day she set out for her brother. All the Council knew of her venture was that she was responding to an anonymous “urgent” tip in the Tyrius system. Even she couldn't remember exactly what she had fabricated at the moment, remembering it to be little more than shoddily crafted, but it was convincing enough for the Council to allow her to go on the “probably nothing” and “there-and-back” assignment alone. It wouldn't be anything dangerous, only a simple recon to the Outer Rim. Her ship was fast; she would be back within the week.  
  
The Council had always trusted her implicitly, beyond her reasoning. She felt a hard pang of guilt for deceiving them, for deceiving everybody, and for a moment she wanted to rip open the starfighter's canopy and gulp down fresh air. Lie down in her bed and forget this charade that had entered her mind.  
  
In the end, she remained in her seat and left the slanted transparisteel dome above her head closed shut. _One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . . One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . ._ The urgency she felt at the thought of Saul's distant star won out.  
  
Rosalie shook her head, letting the Force cleanse herself of doubt and let focus replace it. “You'd best hope I'm right about you,” she told Saul under her breath, eyes not leaving the crisscross traffic outside the hangar. _I hope I'm right about you._  
  
One standard year ago, Saul Seeker's public file was updated from MISSING to PRESUMED DEAD. It had been seven years since the Massacre of the Aldera Royal Palace—so poetically dubbed—and seven years since Saul hadn't been found among the dead. With the grand and grisly fashion in which the others were slain and laid bare, it could only be assumed that the state of the prince would have been the same had he been killed, too. But his living sister knew he was alive, that the HoloNet's presumption was wrong.  
  
Rosalie's hands curled around the control yoke as she steeled her resolve. Saul's presence wasn't like the others. When Tura, Marich, and Jemmila died, their lights went out completely. Empty and gray were the places they had once occupied, like stone paths leading nowhere. Saul's was different; it was light. Diaphanous and fragile, but beyond all doubt _there_. If Rosalie thought hard enough, she could sense him no differently than she had when she was a child in the Royal Palace. It was no different a feeling than when he would braid her hair while bread baked, or when she would help him pick herbs and flowers for teas. When she reached a certain depth of meditation, Rosalie could almost smell the sage bread Saul was so good at making, and feel his gentle hands weave airy braids in her hair. He wasn't as good at it as Jemmila was, and couldn't weave in beads of orro wood and bronzium like she could, but there was a certain loose flow to his braids that made her look like a woodland sprite when she wore them.  
  
There was no blood overpowering the purity and joy of her memories with him, her big brother, as there had always been with the others. The man who had thrown her into the deep end of her prophecy, leaving her to thrash for land and swallow saltwater, had failed to take Saul's life. How, Rosalie could never figure.  
  
As she carefully piloted the ship through the hangar's gaping entry, her stomach unsteady, she resolved to ask him herself.


	5. Saul

He breathed once more, calm and collected, and opened the door. To his surprise, nobody had been waiting outside. He sipped the water again and stood by the door, unsure of what to do next. He had never done this before.  
  
After a few minutes of perusing the cantina, Saul finished the water and deposited it in a receptacle. He laid eyes on two spacers, a man and a woman, either Human or Near-Human, sitting in a booth, talking in close quarters. They seemed to have been looking at him. The woman was stirring her bubbly drink with her index finger.  
  
Suddenly taken by a flush of nerve, Saul paused in front of their table. “Is there something you need?”  
  
They looked up at him, both pairs of eyebrows raised in surprise. Otherwise, their faces and postures were completely relaxed. Belatedly, their gazes fell upon his injuries.  
  
“Looks like you need more than we do, Your Highness,” said the man on the left. He had black hair and a smooth face, and couldn't be older than twenty-five. Concern had his light brown eyes flickering over Saul's person, like a medic inspecting a patient and taking inventory of what was wrong.  
  
Saul's title took the nerve right out of him, like a support cable had been detached and he now swayed slightly to one side. When it wasn't spoken by Taran, it had a quality that made him uneasy. He was hyper-aware of the slight dampness that turned the bandages into what felt like clammy sheets of slickplast.  
  
“I need a ride out-system.” His eyes moved between either spacer. “Either of you know where I can find one?”  
  
The woman—Saul judged her as the older of the pair—leaned forward to rest her elbows on the smooth cream-colored tabletop. She had the same blue-black hair as her counterpart, pulled tightly behind her head in a long tail and cutting a straight line across her forehead. She was younger than thirty, though not by much. “What's a prince need a ride out-system for? Not saying we can't do it, I'm just curious.” She gave a casual, flippant shrug.  
  
Anxiety sneaked back into a crevice beneath Saul's solar plexus, and he looked quickly over his left shoulder. He stepped closer to the table. They were tentative, childlike steps. The pair didn't appear to notice, eyes affixed to Saul's face. “I also—. . . I need it to be kept a secret,” he said, hushed and secretive.  
  
The man looked more concerned now than ever, and the woman leaned back slightly, sizing him.  
  
“No questions asked, huh?” she asked, lacing her fingers under her chin. When Saul nodded, she affected the tone distinct of those of older generations speaking to younger ones. A tone that insisted upon trust. “You can tell me, Highness. You a runaway?”  
  
Saul considered that for a moment. He faltered, opening his mouth without anything to say. He steeled himself against the stinging behind his eyes.  
  
“Hey, that's all right,” the woman said, flipping her hands palms-up. “No questions asked. Might cost you extra, though.”  
  
“I can pay it.” He hoped.  
  
“Lovely, then. I'm Doja.” She flicked a thumb to her right. “This is my brother, Roth. Sit down, Highness, you look suspicious. Especially with all those cuts.”  
  
Saul took the offer and sat down after Doja scooted closer to her brother. “Please don't call me that.”  
  
Doja took silent note, bobbing her head to one side. “Where're you going?” Her Mid Rim accent had an Outer Rim twinge to it that was slightly comforting. “Roth and I are headed for Nar Shaddaa. Good business there these days.”  
  
“Are you two smugglers?” Saul asked before he thought not to.  
  
“Nah,” Roth answered.  
  
“Just got eyes for good opportunities,” Doja said. “So, where are you looking to go?”  
  
“Oh—right.” Saul hadn't thought about it, and he felt ridiculous. He thought about saying _just anywhere_ , but stopped himself. He had doubts about appearing too desperate.  
  
Although, by all accounts, he had already looked the part.  
  
“Zeltron,” Saul said, blurting out the first world between Kattada and Nar Shaddaa that came to mind.  
  
“Interesting destination,” Roth commented. His thick eyebrows perked conversationally. “Know anybody there?”  
  
“You miss out on the definition of _no questions asked_?” Doja turned to her brother with a hard look and silenced him. “Zeltron's good,” she said to Saul. “Any cargo, other people?”  
  
“No. Just me.”  
  
“We can get you there for three hundred in advance.”  
  
Somehow, Saul had expected it to be more. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the silver ingots, counting six and passing them to Doja under the table. He wondered persistently if that was proper etiquette, or if he should have waited until they were in the ship. Either way, Doja didn't make a fuss of it, pocketing the credits and casting a discreet smile Saul's way.  
  
“We were just leaving in a couple minutes.” Doja took a sip of her drink, which was pale green in color. “You in a hurry?”  
  
Saul shrugged, glancing around the room and gently wringing his fingers on his lap. The jaunty music and the distant sounds of laughter and glasses clinking seemed to grow louder the more seconds passed after the deal was made. “I'm ready when you are.”

* * *

“Say, if you're not gonna speak up about the bandages, at least let us redo them,” Roth said, walking in-between Saul and Doja on the trio's way to the docking bay.  
  
Saul brought his fingertips to his face, feeling the mostly-dry fabric and wincing as the cut beneath it stung under the pressure.  
  
“Yeah,” Dojachimed in, “last thing you want is losing your hands to an infection before a party on Zeltron.” She caught Saul's eye and winked. When he tried to smile back out of courtesy, nothing came of it.  
  
Going up the glass elevator was equally as disorientating as going down. Once again, the blue sky wasn't a sky at all, but Jem's eyes. Saul brought a curled hand to his abdomen, closing his eyes to blacken out the blue. Sadness wracked his insides, oppressing and leaden.  
  
“Motion sick?” Doja's voice cut through his thoughts, and he opened his eyes again.  
  
This time, the polite smile came, and his lips tilted upwards at the corners, just so. “A bit.”  
  
She nodded, understanding. “We have some stuff for that. Roth gets it pretty bad sometimes.” She let the topic die there.  
  
Once out in the clear air again, Saul breathed in deeply. The feeling of fresh air in his lungs was wonderful. It was only then that he realized how _heavy_ the cantina air had been. Up there on the docking bays, high above the ground, Saul felt safer than amongst all the people.  
  
Doja lowered the boarding ramp and, once it touched the ground, gestured grandly for Saul to enter. “Welcome aboard the _Red Star_. Thing of beauty, huh?”  
  
A nondescript freighter ship Saul couldn't identify, he would hardly call it beautiful. He nodded all the same, stepping into the ship and getting the tingly feeling at the back of his head of entering someplace foreign.  
  
Two pairs of footsteps followed him in tandem.  
  
“Funny how a sack of credits will just fall right onto your lap in the middle of a drink, isn't it?”  
  
_Whack_. Blinding pain shot through the right side of Saul's head, and the cold deck of the starship cracked against his jaw when he fell. Thick black cloth was pulled over his head, throwing his world into pitch darkness.  
  
“Like taking candy from a baby.”


	6. Saul

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The character Y'sanne's name as been changed to Doja. This affects the earlier chapter she was in, as well.

“You're never going to believe this. Oh, _blast it_ , you are never going to _kriffing_ believe this!” Roth slammed his hand down on the table, shooting up from his seat in an angry flourish.  
  
Saul jumped in his seat across from the boy, his wrists chafing against his binders. He winced and looked down at the skin, red and irritated. The right wrist had blistered in one place. Doja hadn't taken the key out of her jacket pocket since they left Kattada.  
  
“What?” Doja called, emerging from the hallway that led to the bunkroom. “What's the problem?” She sounded more exasperated than concerned.  
  
Roth exhaled forcefully, thrusting his datapad toward his sister. “Look at this.”  
  
She looked. After a moment, she took the datapad from Roth's hands as her eyes widened. “What the . . . When did this happen?”  
  
“The night we found him.” Roth jerked his head toward Saul, and Doja looked at him briefly. “That _night_ , this whole thing goes down the drain.” He started to laugh. “You've got to be kidding me.”  
  
“Shh,” she snapped, bringing her hand up in a silencing gesture. “Who _did_ this?”  
  
“Call me crazy, Doja, but I'm more concerned with the fact that we just toted the Mute Prince five thousand light years for nothing.”  
  
“Can it already, I'm reading.”  
  
Roth began pacing, and Saul's brow furrowed. At the same time, his stomach twisted in a painful cramp. He had known what she was reading before he saw it.  
  
“Looks like all three of us are shit out of luck.” She placed the datapad on the table and slid it toward her hostage. “Sorry, Highness.”  
  
Saul's arms moved mechanically, and he read the words on the screen through blurry eyes. They only told him what he had been assuming the entire time. The confirmation was worse than the unconscious knowledge, cut him a little deeper, through to his spine. He had only skimmed half of it when he had to look away.  
  
“Must be why he's so beat up,” Roth said, cutting into a beat of silence. “Escaped being killed with the rest of them.”  
  
“Also explains why he practically threw credits at the first pilot who looked at him.” Doja rubbed the side of her face, closing her eyes. “What the hell do we do now?”  
  
“Maybe doe eyes can give us a suggestion,” Roth said venomously, stepping closer to the table.  
  
“Hey.” Doja grabbed Roth's bicep, pulling him back to her side. “Kid's family's dead. Least we could do is have the technical conversation somewhere else.”  
  
Roth scrunched up his nose. “Since when do you care?”  
  
Doja ignored him, walking around the table and picking up the datapad. “Sit tight.” She started to leave, but stopped herself short and turned around. She dug in her jacket for a moment and pulled out a small chip. “Here.” Doja unlocked Saul's binders.  
  
Saul let them fall onto the table, rubbing his wrists close to his chest. Roth gave Doja a look as she passed by him, and she threw her arms out.  
  
“Where's he gonna go? Not exactly a great threat.”  
  
After they left to the bunkroom, Saul let himself fall back against the bench seat. He shut his eyes, the bright lights against them turning his field of vision red-orange. He covered his eyes with his hands, desperate to rid himself of the redness, and pressed hard. Starry spiderwebs crisscrossed in front of him as he leaned forward, resting his forehead on the cool table. His throat tightened with the threat of crying, and when he tried to breathe all that came out was a sob that choked him.

* * *

“Who just kills an entire family like that?” Doja asked, mostly to herself, shaking her head. Her ponytail had started to hurt the back of her head, so she yanked the elastic tie from her hair and shook it out. “What the hell did we miss in the Core?”  
  
“I don't know,” Roth said, petulantly impatient, “but I _do_ know that we should probably just jettison the guy right now.”  
  
Doja pivoted to look at her brother, her brows furrowing. “Kriff, Roth, what's gotten into you? It's not like there's no one to ransom him to anymore, just not his parents.” She thought for a moment. “The Organas knew the Seekers, didn't they? Isn't that what everyone says?”  
  
“Maybe,” Roth said, smoothing out his hair. “Listen, if everyone else there is dead, and we have him, won't everyone start pointing fingers at us? We just happen to stumble upon the bloodied Prince of Alderaan in a _bar_ after the entire royal family's murdered, likely story.”  
  
“That _is_ the story,” Doja said.  
  
“Not one that'll hold up in court! What, you think the JD will believe that, with all this other shit to boot? I'm telling you, we'd be better off just getting rid of him.”  
  
Doja breathed sharply, letting her hand holding the datapad fall to her side. With her other hand, she combed her inky black hair with her fingers, bunching it up in her fist. “That's assuming they don't already know who did it.”  
  
Roth scoffed, almost laughing. “So soon? You think whoever did this hasn't already run for the hills like us?”  
  
Silent for a long moment, Doja let go of her hair and paced to the other side of the room. “There's no reason we can't still ransom him.”  
  
“Are you serious?”  
  
“Yes, I'm serious.” Doja looked at her brother. “I don't want blood on my hands, Roth, that's not what this is. There are ways to do this so we don't even have to look at a police officer.”  
  
“Sure, in holofilms,” Roth muttered, rubbing the back of his neck in exasperation.  
  
“We'll have them transfer the money electronically,” she said, gesturing agitatedly.  
  
“And what about him?”  
  
“We'll _leave him_ in a secure location!” Doja grew angrier, shutting her eyes and exhaling a long breath in an attempt to quell herself. “They never even have to see our faces; we'll wear masks, or just record him and not us, or something.”  
  
Roth put his arms akimbo, tilting his head back. After a moment, he threw his hands up and abandoned influencing his sister to just let it go and wash their hands of this. “Fine. Lovely plan. I'm gonna go take a walk.”  
  
Doja shook her head, looking at the article again and scrolling down the digital page. She called after him, “Do me a favor and think up a nice message to send to the Organas while you're out.”

* * *

Roth found Saul sitting up again, absentmindedly chewing on his thumb nail. “Hey, walk around the hangar for a bit,” the former said, nodding toward the docking ramp. “Maybe after you stretch your legs your vocal cords will show some signs of life, too.”  
  
Saul looked after him, watching him lower the ramp and stretch his arms high above his head as he walked out into the cavernous, gray-green hangar. Even from there, the bright overhead lights stung his unaccustomed eyes. After a moment, he stood slowly. The ligaments in his knees cried out in protest, and he wondered how long he had been sitting like that. Bracing himself on the tabletop, he looked toward the bunkroom and wondered why Doja was staying behind. He didn't wonder for long, however, as the thought of fresh air pulled him toward the exit—albeit stiffly.  
  
Saul all but stumbled down the ramp, squinting at the harsh light. At the far end of an otherwise empty hangar, Roth fiddled with a control panel. Saul looked around, taking in the hulking enormity of the hangar, wondering what ships would possibly be housed here. He felt even smaller.  
  
“Hey! Your Royal Highness!” Roth called, his voice echoing across the space between them. Something told Saul that yelling in this place was seldom very necessary. “You good with tech?”  
  
Saul swallowed, failing to wince this time; he had had a drink of water about an hour before they landed. “A bit,” he answered, raising his voice just slightly so it would carry across the way.  
  
“He speaks!” Roth exclaimed, lifting his hands mockingly. He laughed to himself for a moment before gesturing to the panel. “Come help me get this damn hatch open. Blasted thing's needed fixing for a while now.” It was only an access hatch, big enough for a humanoid to pass through. The hatch for ships was on the opposite side and made up the entire wall when closed, overlooking a cliff.  
  
Saul waited until he crossed the distance before speaking again. “Do you live here?” he asked.  
  
“Around here,” Roth answered. “Our uncle owns this beauty, though.” He gestured vaguely around them. “All right, what's wrong with you, sweetheart?” His voice was strained with the effort of forcing a tool where Saul doubted it would fit. “Need me to buy you dinner first?”  
  
Saul blinked at him, deciding not to linger on the query at length. “Is a circuit loose?”  
  
“That's what I'm trying to figure out.”  
  
“Maybe you should say please,” Saul suggested quietly, looking upward toward the ceiling.  
  
It was meant as a jab, but Roth laughed and took it as a jest along the same train of humor as his own. “Maybe. Here, you try.” He slapped the tool against Saul's chest. “Use your princely finesse.”  
  
Irritated, Saul took the tool and observed internally that he had absolutely no idea what it was—or, for that matter, what it had originally been made to do, since its purpose certainly couldn't have been prying open control panels. “I can't say I know much about this world's technology.”  
  
“Quellor's practically a Core World; it's not much different from yours.”  
  
_Mine_. The word made Saul's heart hitch, a soft yet decipherable pang. He couldn't picture Alderaan without feeling sick, let alone remember that, by now, _his_ people would be looking for him. The thought made him dizzy.  
  
Saul focused through his haze and looked at the panel again, feeling a curious tingling sensation about his back, phantom eyes of frantic search parties burning into his skin from light years away. The panel was gray and rusted around the edges, its tiny buttons worn at their centers. Saul wondered if it had ever been replaced.  
  
Guessing, he stuck the sharp end of the tool into a seam that looked like it could be pried open. He waited a beat for Roth to chide him, but the he stayed silent save the light tapping of his foot. Saul twisted the tool, feeling the casing give. He couldn't recall ever seeing a control panel so old before, only in holos. Oddly, the rest of the hangar didn't seem as outdated. In all the control panels he had seen and used, there was only one piece to the whole thing, nothing to separate. He contributed that to naivety.  
  
The more he pried, the weaker Saul's arms felt, his wrists threatening to give and loosen his fingers around the alien tool. He felt more hungry and thirsty now than he had throughout the duration of his journey. An invisible force pinched his stomach hard and he had to stop. He let out a breath, holding a bandaged hand to his abdomen.  
  
“Thing's stuck pretty good, huh?” Roth stepped in front of Saul, ignoring his state and taking the tool from his hand. “Must be the rust, or . . . something.” After several moments of Roth attempting the same strategy, his hostage grew faint with the heat of the hangar mixing with dehydration. It must have been hot outside. “Blast it. Hey—what's wrong with you?”  
  
Saul did his best to steady himself, biting down hard on the inside of his cheek to force some alertness. “Fine. I'm fine. I just need to sit down.”  
  
He tried at walking back toward the ship for a couple of steps before realizing that it was in vain. Sitting against the wall beside the panel, he rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his forehead against his clasped hands.  
  
“Are you _dying_? What's going on?” Roth asked, his brow furrowing in something more akin to annoyance than concern.  
  
“Can I have some water? Please?” Saul asked. His voice came out pleading, strained on his suddenly dry throat.  
  
Roth flicked his eyes upward briefly in vexation. “All right. I need to get some stuff out of the ship to get this kriffer open, anyway.”  
  
Roth walked away, his footsteps giving off clanking echoes, but Saul failed to notice. He shut his eyes, dry and red and itching, and all he could see behind the lids was the oppressive light of the datapad. All he could see was that article, telling him in well-worded, stiff sentences that his family was dead, and that he probably was, too.

* * *

Returning to the ship, Roth called out, “Hey! You seen that toolbox around? Control panel on the hatch is acting up again.”  
  
“Sure, in there,” Doja answered, stepping out of the bunkroom, nose still in the datapad. She pointed lamely to an access panel in the far bulkhead, painted black.  
  
Roth offered halfhearted thanks, retrieving the toolbox—decidedly worse for wear—he was hardly able to stand up straight before his sister stopped him short.  
  
“Hey, check this out,” she said, pointing to a paragraph down toward the bottom of the article. “One of the sisters is still alive.”  
  
Roth cocked an eyebrow. “Really?”  
  
“Yeah, the younger one. Says the Jedi took her in.” She paused, looking up. “The _Jedi_?”  
  
Roth snorted. “What, are they an orphanage now? I thought the Seekers hated Jedi, anyway. Wasn't that what someone said?”  
  
She seemed to get distracted by a thought. She lit up. “Hey, don't you know what this means? She probably saw who did it, right? I doubt she'll give _our_ descriptions.”  
  
At that point, Roth was too tired to agree or disagree sincerely. “Sure—I doubt it'll matter, though, unless she can get out of her religious conversion ceremony long enough to testify.”


	7. Rosalie

Rosalie had always slept better in space. There was something about the deep hum of the deck that relaxed her through to her bones, and the complete silence that chased away the noise in her head. She had been looking forward to getting some rest during the remainder of her trip to the first checkpoint: Coriis Station, within the Tyrius system. It was close to Rodia, which increased the probability of encountering trouble. With proper rest, she figured, her senses would be heightened to levels ideal for preventing unwanted scuffles. If she kept to herself, refueled, and got on her way without accidentally bumping someone's shoulder, the time spent on Coriis Station would be three standard hours at the outside.  
  
The deck hummed with the tensions of hyperspace travel underneath Rosalie's bunk, and she let it rumble through her muscles as she lay on her back. Her mind rang with a continuous stream of worry and excitement. She felt rebellious, in the same way a fourteen year-old who had gone out past curfew may feel. Rosalie tried to cleanse her mind of the emotional disruptions, knowing that excitement would only cloud her reason.  
  
However, _reason_ wasn't a word oft attributed to reckless crusades across the galaxy. But it wasn't what she needed, either, so it didn't matter. What she needed then, in that cramped cot in that surreptitious venture down the Corellian Run, was hope. If she was meant to breed hope to the rest of the galaxy, to shine it from her pores and stand as a pillar of strength for every being who knew of her, then she had to start somewhere. She had to start with instilling hope within _herself_. If the Chosen One cannot bring peace to themselves, then how could they bring peace to an entire galaxy?  
  
They couldn't, was what she decided.  
  
When a being abandoned all hope, there she should stand. Their light and their guardian. Every being in the galaxy was her subject, belligerent or pacific. They were hers, and she was theirs.  
  
The only string holding her upright under the pressure was hope. The only emotion holding the citizens of the Republic steady in the midst of war was hope. If the Force was hope, then so was she.  
  
Her heart was beating quickly as she lay in bed, another moment in which her self-assigned mission began to overwhelm her. She breathed. _One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . ._ The very idea that Rosalie could feel her brother in the Force was unbelievable, but she could. She rolled onto her side, opening her eyes to stare at the floor beside her bunk. Her nerves stirred within her. She could feel him so strongly that her eyes began to water.  
  
When his body had failed to surface, gossips and authorities alike knew of him. Spacers talked about the lost Prince of Alderaan, told stories about how they saw him on a refugee flight to the Kash system, or stowing away on a spice freighter. It registered as somewhat funny in Rosalie's mind, recalling vividly his unwillingness to have a public image. By nature, a royal couldn't avoid it, but damn it if he didn't try.

* * *

In a few hours time, Rosalie was back in the cockpit to land at Coriis Station. She had dreamt of Saul. There was snow, and trees, and him. Snowflakes melted in his hair as his legs swung back and forth, body perched upon the lowest branch of the wide-set pine tree with the carvings in the bark. They'd been there for so long no Seeker or Ta'Shi knew how to place them, or what they meant. All Saul ever knew of them was that he liked to look at them, and imagine the beings who put them there. Maybe they were the workings of the ancient Killiks, or a young couple in love and looking to make their mark on something.  
  
In her dream, Rosalie saw Saul trace the carvings with one finger, lithely rounding all their intricate curves and wide turns. He did this often, smiling softly at the tree bark and swinging his legs. He had said that it cleared his mind. He knew the patterns so well that tracing them didn't require much concentration, and the activity allowed him to think clearly. Jemmila liked to tease him about it, but he took it all in good humor. Saul had always taken everything in good humor.  
  
Rosalie found herself gritting her teeth as she came out of hyperspace. She had to focus now. She dismissed her dream from her mind and gripped the control yoke, steering the Starmite toward the station. The space around Coriis Station wasn't very populated, and the starport itself didn't seem to be of much interest to many, either.  
  
Once Rosalie's ship ID was approved and she was granted access to Docking Bay Seven, she landed her ship and sat back in the pilot's chair. Breathing deeply, she smoothed out the braids in her hair. He was closer—she could feel it, and eagerness tightened its grip around her heart. _One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight . . ._  
  
Rosalie's mind cleared, and she found that she had closed her eyes. “Okay.” She rose to her feet, and an odd feeling came over her. She began to feel uneasy, but didn't think into it. Her nerves had been on edge for days now, and she hadn't eaten much. Filing in her mind a plan to grab a couple of nutrition bars and water after making the proper arrangements for refueling her ship, Rosalie switched off the engines and lowered the boarding ramp. Perfumed with coolant and oil, the air within the station made Rosalie's nose wrinkle briefly. The place was unfamiliar, and a probing of the area with the Force didn't turn up anything but vagaries. Life was present there, and something looming.  
  
Keeping an eye on the entrance to the bay, Rosalie closed the hatch and made sure it was locked. Lifting the hood of her heavy woolen robe, she continued cautiously into the halls just outside the circular, metal room. The corridors somehow maintained an atmosphere of dark-and-gloomy despite the overhead lighting. There were arrows every so often on the matte gray walls with the locations they lead to just underneath them, written in both Aurebesh and Huttese. It was an intricate station, Rosalie found. Easy enough to navigate, but complicated in its design. She passed a conspicuous Duros on her way down a corridor with a flickering light, but they failed to meet her eye just as much as she failed to meet theirs.  
  
Finally, Rosalie came forth from the labyrinth into the hub of Coriis Station: A cavernous atrium with brightly lit counters and small shops, turbolifts available to take one to the upper levels, visible from the lowest point. Balconies with mildly rusted rails lined each level, five in all.  
  
Just as gloomy as the halls that had led to it, but also just as well-lit.  
  
There were precious few beings there, so Rosalie didn't know where to start. After a moment of surveying the area, the uneasiness within her began to steadily increase. She swallowed, walking around just for the sake of moving. She could feel danger and threat, and a Human presence that seemed to latch onto her own. Rosalie clenched her teeth, feeling the reassuring weight of her lightsaber on her hip.  
  
She stopped by a tall directory on the wall to her right, probing the area once again as she pretended to look interested. Someone was in the hub with her, with a sense that stood out against the grayscale backdrop of the other beings she could get a grasp on, more threatening than the indifferent Duros. She would almost wish for their company, as at least they lacked a distinctly malignant sense. Whoever this was sought to hurt, and had their sights set on the young thing “lost” in an unfamiliar place. The distance between them shortened, and Rosalie's sense of them grew stronger.  
  
They were . . . _dark_. Darker than just a raucous pirate or a smuggler. The base of Rosalie's skull tingled with alert as their footsteps came within earshot. Almost against her volition, Rosalie's feet kickstarted and she walked down an open hallway just to the left of the directory, her stomach tightening with a sense of urgency. Something told her not to stay and talk it out with the stranger, and she didn't question it. There was something blocking her ability to sense the person wholly, like some kind of invisible cloak that hid a part of themselves from her—  
  
until it all revealed itself to her at their will, like a bolt of ice shooting through her skull.  
  
Rosalie's breath caught sharply in her throat, and her limbs all turned to freezing water. A strong, firm hand lay itself on her shoulder and spun her around. Her hood, already falling from her quick pace, fell from her head completely with the momentum. Her stomach twisted violently as fear pumped through her. She tasted bile at the back of her throat.  
  
“I've been meaning to talk to you,” he said. _He_. Reality hadn't sunk in until he spoke, his grating, deep voice scratching against Rosalie's eardrums and freezing her feet in place. She hadn't realized how hard he was holding onto her shoulder, and the pain of his grasp was what pulled her out of her initial shock.  
  
Panic willed her lightsaber from her belt and into her hand, but his hold on the Force would just as soon have it knocked away. Briefly, she watched it clatter to the floor. She looked back up at the face of her nightmares and suddenly she was ten years old again, and the memory of the smell of blood came back to her in a rush. Only this time, it wasn't simple outlines and a grin she could see. There were no shadows beneath a cowl concealing his identity, no luxury of ignorance.  
  
But he was still smiling, amused and observant. “You're much taller now,” he observed, sending another wave of cold down the back of Rosalie's neck. He stared down at her, eyes as pale and as cold as Ilum's snowdrifts. “And all the more beautiful.” He spoke with empty warmth, like a long-absent relative.  
  
Rosalie's vision blurred and grayed slightly, and she grew dizzy. He sensed her fading, so he shook her violently and briefly. This kicked her feet into gear, the silver almost struggling to balance herself on wobbly knees. Finally, she pulled her lightsaber back up from the floor, wanting desperately to unlatch his hand from her shoulder. But she found herself fumbling like a fawn on its first steps, and it was all the easier for her to be disarmed the second time.  
  
“You're growing stronger everyday, Rosalie,” he told her, advancing on her slightly. She moved backwards—though the effort was futile. “And I think it's time we spoke.” His thick accent was nearly a purr as he spoke his words lowly.  
  
The Force was screaming warnings all around her, Rosalie's mind swept with a plunging darkness that threatened to devour her. The inside of her skull felt like it was burning. Adrenalin threw her free hand to his wrist, but experience and training were both lost on her now. There was a brief struggle, and he brought the back of his fist to her mouth.  
  
The swing split open the corner of her mouth and drew blood, and she fell to one knee, holding her face as pain shot through her jaw. He brought her down to her back with a forceful shove against her chest, and held her there by pushing a boot down on her left wrist, drawing the arm out to a painful stretch. Only now was the ability to vocalize returning to her, but just as she started to, his hand clamped down over her lips and a knife was drawn from a sheath at his hip with the other. He held it to the middle of her neck, pressing just gently enough to threaten blood. “Shhh.” He brought his face down beside hers, his stubble scratching Rosalie's cheek. “ _Shhh_ ,” he repeated, more forcefully, jostling her.  
  
Bile burned the back of Rosalie's throat, and she could feel tears forming in her eyes. She stopped squirming at his command, scared out of moving an inch by the malice enveloping him. The knife's blade was as cold as space, and her wrist hurt under his heavy boot. Her entire body screamed in panic and terror, and the dark power hovering over her and the memories that flooded her made her wish she were unconscious.  
  
He rose from her ear, looking down at her with calmness, his patronizing stare penetrating her. “I believe a proper introduction is in order,” he began, black-robed body shifting to what she could only assume was a more comfortable position for holding her down. “One less . . . _messy_ than before.” His lips quirked upwards on one side, just as they had eight years ago when he held her in his arms. White-hot animus began to warm the inside of Rosalie's chest. “In hindsight, I believe I could have gone about a more civilized manner of getting acquainted with you . . . —but it doesn't matter. I would have killed them, anyway.”  
  
Fear buckled under the weight of anger long enough for Rosalie to raise her right hand to him. His knife nicked the skin of her neck as she moved to hit him, but the strike she managed to land was satisfying enough that she didn't notice it in the heat of the moment—the pain bursting throughout her hand from the punch, however, couldn't go unrecognized.  
  
With this, his hand lifted from her mouth and she sat up, the mention of her family too much to bear. How _dare_ he? While her left wrist was still compromised, Rosalie regained enough of a grip on the Force to bring his knife hand to hers. Amidst much movement, she could only get a purchase on his hand, not his wrist, so it was easier for him to yank himself from her grip and slide the blade across the inside of her lower knuckles. A thin line of red appeared on her hand, and the pain it brought distracted her long enough for his dominance to resume. This time, he pressed his hand firmly against the crook of her neck, making it hard for Rosalie to breathe.  
  
He grinned down at her, and gave a deep chuckle that suggested both surprise and amusement. “By the Force,” he exclaimed. “Your master, give them my praise on your right hook.” The back of his knife hand rubbed against the redness on his cheekbone, and the grin tuned down to a smirk. He took a breath, placed the knife at the center of Rosalie's upper lip, and lifted his brows. “Now—about that _civil_ introduction.” Rosalie's mouth opened slightly to let out a breath under the pressure of his hand, and he softly dragged the knife down her lips, tapping its keen point lightly on her bottom teeth. Her lower jaw tingled, and her knees shuddered numbly. “My name is Enric Kelrian. I'm from a beautiful world in the Inner Rim. Will that be all the pleasantries needed, or would you like to know more?”  
  
Enric. Now she had a name—a name to assign to the very worst thing the young Jedi had ever known. The most vile being in the galaxy now had a name. As short as it was, hearing it felt like a long and drawn out process, and it echoed in Rosalie's head over and over again, cacophonous.  
  
Rosalie's anger surrendered to fear yet again, and she wanted to cry. She wanted to run.  
  
She _had_ to.  
  
But she _couldn't_.  
  
“There will be time enough for you to know everything.” Enric's knife had been held on Rosalie's bottom teeth for a long time, but it had now moved back to her neck, its point pressing against her soft skin, just shy of drawing blood. The cut she had already sustained still stung, and even more so as his hand brushed against it. “In time, you will come to learn what I have. You'll come to know the truth of yourself, and of those around you. You will learn that you needed to be free of them. I did it for you.” He spoke with impossible softness, mirroring the way he had spoken to her when she was a child. “You'll know that——you already do.” He nodded, as if to convince her.  
  
Rosalie's mind was racing, and her breathing grew quick and shallow. She tried to breathe evenly, execute the exercises, but her senses were overloaded. She began to feel an instinctive defense, Enric's words and sense all scratching against her conscious with claws of frosted durasteel.  
  
Eight years of letting the blood coagulate, of watching her, of waiting. Enric had waited, and his sense swelled with pride at the culmination that lay beneath him. Rosalie could feel it, just as well as she could see his pale lips bear his teeth in another wicked grin, as if he were an animal, waiting for the right moment to tear at her jugular vein and kill her.  
  
Rosalie wanted to redeem her weakness against him with a snappy retort, another blow, _anything_. But her legs were still numb and her hand throbbed in pain at her side. She was getting a headache from being struck, from being as good as choked, and it was clouding her thoughts. Despite all of this, fury kept her eyes locked on his. Seeing his face in full clarity, as opposed to in shadows, made her teeth ache with a smoldering rage a Jedi was trained to resist. His face was the last thing her sister saw. The last thing her mother and her father saw. And if he had it his way, eventually, it would be the last thing Rosalie Seeker saw, too.  
  
Impulsively—and foolishly—Rosalie rose her free hand to Enric's face again, putting the strength of the Force behind it, but he released his hold on her neck and stopped her short, taking her wrist in so tight a grip it made her wince. He yanked her close to him, sitting her up and stretching her left arm slightly less. Her breath caught once again as his thumb caressed the heel of her hand, a gentle, affectionate gesture that washed away the heat in her blood and rose more acid to burn her throat.  
  
“Don't fool yourself, child,” Enric told her, lowering his tone to a whisper. Rosalie could feel his breath on her lips, and the choking, voidlike darkness that surrounded him suffocated her. “The dark side is power. The Jedi and all their lies will not give you what you're destined for, what you deserve. The light side will not give you power.”  
  
Something reminiscent of courage stirred in Rosalie's chest, breaking through the hard shell of fear that had encased her. “I don't want power,” she said to him, all but whispering. But there was strength and defiance behind her voice. _I don't want power. I've never wanted power. I just want to help._  
  
Enric smiled wider, as if he had read the thoughts she failed to voice—as if the sound of her voice, cracked and shaken, was mellifluous to him. “You will.” He was certain, and that certainty penetrated her in the Force. It chilled her spine and furrowed her brow. The handle of his knife struck the side of her face before she could form any further thoughts or words, and her vision swam and blurred. He let her fall against the corridor's hard floor, and the pressure was suddenly lifted from her wrist. She belatedly realized he had stood up, setting her wrist free.  
  
Now she could do something. She could search for her lightsaber and do something. But truly, she couldn't. She wished she could, but her head hammered from within and her face burned and throbbed. Darkness was still ablaze in its black fire as he stood above her. She squinted, realizing her vision was fading. The fluorescent lighting stung her eyes as his dark, blurry form moved out of their way, and she moved her head to the side too quickly. Slowly, his proud presence faded from Rosalie's reach in the Force, and she was alone again.


	8. Saul

Water sloshed against the sleeve of Saul's jacket as Roth prodded him with a glass. He jerked, his hand reaching for the wet spot. As he pulled his fingers away, he half expected to see them shaded with red.  
  
“Drink up,” Roth said, swaying the cup—plastic, now that Saul looked at it more closely—and thereby dripping more water onto his prisoner's clothes.  
  
Saul took the water in-between both hands, like a child, and drank greedily. The action pained his throat but cleared his head, well enough that when he looked up to watch Roth continue to fiddle with the control panel, he wasn't dizzy. As he finished the water, Roth finally acquired the proper tool to pry open the casing from a toolbox by his feet. It, like many items and superficial details around the place, was rusted around the edges and cheaply made. Inside, it was devoid of shelves or separated sections; all of the tools were strewn together without order, and several small, nondescript cables with wires fraying out from either end tangled things together. Or maybe they were bunching together tools of similar use, makeshift and confusing organization.  
  
As Saul pondered the toolbox with more depth than a toolbox warranted, Roth at last conquered his task.  
  
He opened the panel door with a sigh, stooping with one hand on his knee to look at the controls. Saul stood up, setting the plastic cup on the floor.  
  
“Oh, kriff's sake,” Roth said, throwing the tool back in the box and indignantly flipping a switch before slamming the cover shut again. It only bounced off and swung open again, bumping Saul's arm. “Safety switch was flipped.”  
  
“Safety switch?”  
  
“Our uncle practically _lives_ in the shed outside when he's on Quellor. Flips the switch here by remote whenever he leaves so people don't get in.” Roth pressed the button to open the access hatch, and a sliver of outside light cut into Saul's vision with brief pain. He blinked hard, watching the sliver grow into a rectangle. “As to why he doesn't just lock it like everybody else, don't ask me.”  
  
As his eyes adjusted, Saul swallowed hard and looked outside. He hadn't gotten a good look at it when they were landing. He leaned on the door frame with one hand, pressing his shoulder against it to lean out slightly. Rolling plains spanned the distance between Roth and Doja's uncle's hangar to the next, which overlooked a cliff face similar to theirs. The cliff rounded and snaked for a couple of miles onward, a strange formation. A couple hundred yards after the neighboring hangar, the cliff dipped down into a valley, through which ran a stream so tiny it was only a glittering silver-blue thread beneath the waning sun. Saul looked to his left as Roth exited the hangar, again lifting his arms high above his head in a stretch and exhaling deeply. The “shed” Roth spoke of was more along the lines of a small house, probably only one room large but big enough to live comfortably in. It was shaped like a box and covered with the same gray-green metal sheeting as the hangar, its windows shaded with curtains from the inside and its front steps rickety, rusted metal that looked dangerous to touch with bare skin.  
  
“Your uncle must have been gone for a long time,” Saul said observantly.  
  
Roth clicked his tongue. “We've all been gone a long time.” When he turned his torso halfway around to look at Saul, he called out, “Hey, feel free to walk around! Not like there's anywhere to go. I won't be far, anyway.”  
  
Saul's jaw set involuntarily, and he stepped out onto the grass. Foliage on Quellor must grow slowly, he thought, as the blades didn't come up farther than his ankles. The weeds around the uncle's abode, however, were much higher, tiny pinpricks of color in the form of flowers peaking out from behind clusters of thin, striped leaves. Some of the plants had what looked like feelers the width of spiderweb grouped atop their tall stems, dancing independently of one another in the gentle breeze, reaching out for passing insects. As Saul walked closer to them, though, they didn't look carnivorous. He breathed in the subtle sweetness of the flowers, the tranquility of temperate evening air quelling the uneven patter of his heart.  
  
The assuage of his nerves didn't last long, though. He looked up at the facade of the house and stared beyond it, at the valleys and small towns that dotted the landscape. The landscape undisturbed by high mountains or hills greater than several meters, Quellor looked peaceful and docile. Saul couldn't see skylines or any hints of larger cities no matter where upon the horizon he looked. _Any actual cities must be on the other side of the planet entirely._ Roth wasn't kidding about the prince having nowhere to go.  
  
Saul looked over his shoulder, and the dull ache at the base of his skull sharpened into a starburst of pain. He gasped and seethed, jerking a bandaged hand to his neck and turning the rest of his body to relieve the strain. As he rubbed at the tendons crying out beneath his skin, the pain subsided. The stars cleared from his vision, and Saul looked to see Roth a good ways away, walking along a winding dirt-and-clay trail lined with flower-weeds and stones. Every now and then, he stopped, his black hair shining in the light, to kick a rock out of his way or to observe something in the distance to either side.  
  
His hand falling from his neck, Saul turned back to the house with tentative movements, fearful of inciting more wrath from the heated durasteel rods that had replaced his muscle tissue. Upon placing his weight on the first step that led to the house's porch, the metal creaked but didn't bend. Its sharp edges disconcerted him, and the thought invaded his head of the rusted blade of that step cutting into his flesh, blood pouring out onto the weeds and grass. Saul paused sharply in his movements, shaking the thought away and blinking hard. He took a deep breath, tearing his eyes away from the steps and looking back at Roth. Farther away now, he wasn't stopping at all, walking without purpose yet without indifference.  
  
Saul walked up the rest of the steps and crossed the porch to the door. Shifting his weight and feeling grains of dirt crunch beneath his boots, he reached out to the old-fashioned handle and turned it downward. A small _click_ as the door unlatched, and Saul's brows rose. He wondered why a man who secured his hangar so scrupulously would leave his home unlocked. Or maybe it wasn't his home at all, just a place to keep supplies and to keep himself from time to time—just a shed, as Roth had said.  
  
Swinging the door open, Saul felt an uneasiness settle in his chest, the lingering, nebulous feeling of being somewhere he shouldn't. He continued anyway, the sensation blending in with the others gnawing in his chest and becoming indistinct among the collection of myriad agonies.  
  
The house was one room large, with one door leading to what was probably the refresher. Another door, beside the small kitchen, likely led to either a pantry or a closet. There was scarcely anything in the house save for the basics—a double-wide cot, some small tables and chairs, a rug that released a small cloud of dust when Saul stepped on it, and deep foreboding. On the walls were no holos, plants, or tapestries, only vague stains from water damage and smudges of oil—like the uncle had unconsciously touched the walls after handling starship parts. Each of Saul's footsteps elicited small noises from the floorboards, like they were speaking to him. In curiosity, he opened the first door and took a step into the refresher. Relatively clean, if not old. The mirror above the sink, inlaid within the wall, was heavily water-spotted, and had a handle at its bottom right. Saul reached over and pulled it open, revealing the cabinet within. Its shelves were empty save for a couple of dental hygiene items and a hairbrush. Saul closed the cabinet, feeling cakey dust coming away on his fingers, and exited the room.  
  
He approached the second door and opened it without much ceremony. It was just a bit smaller than the refresher, wire shelves lining the walls and stocked with nonperishable foodstuffs. Grains, beans, airtight containers of preserved fruits and vegetables. Along the floor were crates and boxes that looked out of place among the rest, all-black and tactical-looking. Saul caught the side of one with the toe of his boot and steadied himself on a shelf. That one was flatter than the rest, like a briefcase. He knelt down and wiped the dust from the lid. In a thin shaft of sunlight shining in from between two curtains, the dust swirled and hung there like a golden nebula.  
  
Feeling a peculiar lack of tact and a curiosity that overruled his innate respect for privacy, Saul unclasped the odd case's fasteners and and lifted the hinged lid. He pulled back, gasping quietly and inhaling a few dust particles. They tickled his throat, but he swallowed the feeling instead of coughing it away. At the sight of several blasters of various models laid safely in foamlike casing, all of them in moderate condition with gray-black residue around the muzzles, Saul felt the tight, entrapping urge to be as quiet as possible. His left hand covered his mouth as the right moved toward the closest blaster to his person, almost outside of his own volition. His left hand loosened, his lips parting behind splayed, gently shaking fingers. The weapon—sleek and small in size, the kind of weapon you'd see on a Naboo guard's utility belt—was heavy against his palm, and it hurt when its weight shifted against his bandage. He blinked through a wince and looked from the blaster in his hand to its companions in the flat case—and to the similar containers stored beneath the shelves.  
  
As Saul was deciding whether or not to look in those, too, he heard the front door open. Without thinking, he threw the blaster case shut without replacing the one he had taken, shoving it with his foot back into place.  
  
“Your Highness?”  
  
Saul swallowed hard as he stood, belatedly remembering the blaster. A brief flood of nausea tightened the glands beneath his jaw, and he hid his right hand behind the door frame as he stood in Roth's sight.  
  
“There you are,” Roth said, smiling unctuously with half of his mouth.  
  
“Sorry,” Saul said, his fingertips growing sweaty against the blaster handle. “I just—got curious.”  
  
Roth snorted, pocketing his hands and looking around the shed-house. “Don't worry about it. Locks only work on the door half the time, anyway. I figure that if you can get in, welcome.”  
  
“So,” Saul said, remaining in the doorway as Roth ran a hand along the kitchen countertop and flicked away the dust when he got to the end, “why doesn't your uncle safety switch the shed, too?”  
  
It would be generous to call the noise Roth made a _chuckle_. “He's an odd guy.” He made eye contact with Saul for a couple of silent seconds before turning around and walking about the living room. “I think he's a bit out of it, know what I'm saying? He's out in who knows where right now—trading parts in the capital, probably. Besides, there's not exactly a load to steal in here, anyway.”  
  
Saul considered clandestinely and with lightning speed putting the blaster back in its case. But just as the thought entered his mind, another countered it: The memory, distant and foggy despite forming just that same day, of Roth's insistent and casual dismissal of Saul's life to his sister. Just edging on the corner of earshot, Saul had heard Roth's suggestions to Doja through the sinewy membrane covering his consciousness then. He bit down on the side of his tongue, tightening his grip on the blaster as he glanced between the open door and the back of Roth's head. Doja's insistence upon keeping Saul alive provided some sense of security around her—he would much rather be in the company of a woman who wanted to sell him off alive than a man who didn't care either way. Saul wondered how Roth would even do it—kill him. He didn't look like the type who could really follow through with killing another being, but then again, Saul wasn't well-versed on discerning that type of fine detail about a person.  
  
Soundlessly, he double-checked that the blaster's safety was on and set it to STUN before nestling it in the waistband of his trousers. He exited the closet, closing the door behind him.  
  
“Doja probably wants us back by now,” Roth said, speaking abruptly and cutting into the silence. It was almost dusk, the sun setting in a vibrant burst of orange, gold, and purple. Roth placed a hand on Saul's shoulder, leading him out the door. “You might not be tortured with our company too much longer, Highness; she's got a _grand_ plan.”  
  
Saul looked out at the sunset, not hearing Roth's words. His throat closed around a breath, and he felt choked. He could practically see Jem's paintbrushes leaving those scarlets and ochres behind upon a white canvas. How attentive she would be with the white-hot center, the half-circle blaze of the sun disappearing behind the horizon. The purple-pink bruises of clouds streaking across the burst of warmth in translucent billows of cool. He envisioned her reverently placing her palette and brush down and shaking cramps out of her hands, stained red and orange, an accidental stripe of yellow bleeding from the top of her forehead into her hairline, fireflies glowing in the midnight darkness of her hair. She would see that in the mirror and immediately pick up her tools again, targeting the bottom corner of her canvas and inserting a cluster of fireflies among the patch of millaflowers she had done earlier. Jemmila didn't know if they had fireflies on Naboo—she wouldn't have researched that detail, he knew; she hated insects and any mention of them, except for the glow of fireflies—but anyone could be convinced by anything she painted.  
  
“Hey!” Roth jabbed Saul's arm with his elbow. “If you zone out on me one more time . . .” It was as if he had forgotten the entire reason Saul was in his company to begin with—as though there was anything about his current reality that would make him want to stay alert for as long as was being demanded of him.  
  
Walking down the scary metal steps and across the half-beaten grass expanse that led back to the hangar's access hatch, Saul imagined that red paint on Jemmila's hands swapped out for blood. He felt sick, remembering the HoloNet article. He hadn't been able to read any further than the sentence that contained the word _murdered_. It perplexed him, shifted his world a little bit to the side. Saul and his sister had been targeted once before, and they never caught whomever fired those shots in Terrarium City. He wondered, numbly, if this had been the second, half-successful attempt on their lives.  
  
But then—why kill their mother and father, too?  
  
The thought sent him over the edge, the memory that they were gone, too, and he collapsed to his hands and knees, throwing up on the grass. All watery bile. He sobbed, his hair sticking to his brow with sweat he hadn't realized was there.  
  
Roth kept walking, unperturbed.


	9. Saul

The small blinking light on the holorecorder gave Saul a headache, nagging and pinching at the crest of his forehead. He looked between Doja and Roth as they consulted behind the recorder. It was anything but conspiratorial, how the two of them bluntly laid out their options as they finished setting up the shot, making sure Saul was perfectly centered and in focus. It grated on him, and the anger it produced manifested on his face in such a way that it only made him look distraught—which was perfect.  
  
“Three million is a lot to ask.”  
  
“For an Alderaani prince? I don't think so.”  
  
“Not even the Organas will be willing to put up that much cash.”  
  
“You're being pessimistic. Prince Charming was basically their surrogate nephew; what won't they pay to get him back there safe?”  
  
“How do you know all this shit?”  
  
“I read up.”  
  
Roth scoffed at his sister, rolling his eyes to the side and resting them on Saul. “I still think this is a bad idea.”  
  
“Of course you do,” Doja said, deadpan.  
  
“I just—What if they trace our signal, huh?”  
  
“You think I haven't already thought of that?” Doja looked mock offended, looking up from the recorder's viewfinder and cocking a sharply tweezed eyebrow. “We're not even _sending_ the holo via signal, Roth, we're putting it on a chip and delivering it via courier.”  
  
“Oh, and just how the hell will we be doing that?” Roth asked, at the same time Saul himself thought a similar question. It wasn't easy to intercept a government official's physical correspondence, and security surrounding a prominent Alderaani family would be tenfold, especially now.  
  
“There are ways to do it,” Doja said, turning back to the recorder and tweaking it to the side one more time, observing Saul's sullen, bandaged face in the viewfinder. “It's not as hard as you think.”  
  
“Yes, it is,” Saul said, his voice having lost a minute amount of its scratchiness. They had hydrated him well throughout the morning, since he would be doing all of the talking. But he hadn't slept for more than ten standard minutes the night before, so the tired, sunken drag of his thick Core Worlds accent both negated the effect of hydration on his voice and upped the cinematic quality for his harrowing ransom holo. “The Organas don't have a public mailing address,” he told Doja. “I can't think of any noble family on Alderaan or otherwise that does.”  
  
Doja pulled back just so, a sour expression puckering her entire face.  
  
“He speaks,” Roth said, once again, before Doja could open her mouth.  
  
“Unless you plan to drop it on their doorstep yourself,” Saul continued, his face sharp with exasperation more so than irritation, “I don't understand how you propose to deliver it _via courier_.”  
  
“Well, what do you suggest, Your Highness, hm?” Doja asked, stepping around the holorecorder, setting her hands on her hips. A strand of ink-black hair fell loose from behind her ear and lay across her cheekbone. In the fluorescent light of the hangar bay, it took on a blue tinge. “Scramble the signal and wait for every single master decoder in the Core Worlds to determine the origin?”  
  
“If you scramble it _well_ enough, they won't be able _to_ decode it.” Saul's face was absent a smirk, but it was present in his tone as he angled his eyes upward to meet hers. “But I guess that's what you're saying, isn't it? Given that I was a stroke of luck for you two, you didn't have much time to refine your criminal mastery.”  
  
Doja ran her tongue along the bottom row of her teeth, glaring down at Saul as he continued to hold her gaze, unflinching. His seemingly sudden gusto took her by surprise, and the defensive heat rising in her chest made it difficult for her to form a response that wouldn't effectively be spitting in his face.  
  
“Listen—” Doja took a step forward, jabbing her index finger toward Saul.  
  
“Careful,” he interrupted, breaking eye contact and nodding toward the recorder. “You're in the shot.”  
  
Doja whipped her head around to see that she had stepped in front of the recorder's view, and Roth confirmed with a small snort that she had, indeed, shown the bottom portion of her face on holo. She scoffed and hurried back behind the recorder. She uselessly recentered the shot, for the sake of doing something with her hands that wasn't slapping the Prince of Alderaan in the face. “I'll edit it out.”  
  
“With what software?” Roth asked, folding his arms.  
  
“Maybe you _should_ just kill me,” Saul said, deflating the fledgling sense of lightness in the air between the three of them, as strained as it was.  
  
Both siblings looked at him, nonplussed. There was something resolute in the way he said it, unlike the cool mock of his previous criticisms. The look in his eyes told them this wasn't another jab.  
  
“I mean it,” he said, absentmindedly playing at a bandage on his hand—fresh, replaced just a standard hour before. “One way or another, you'll get caught trying to ransom me out. And if I go back to Alderaan, I won't be going back to anything except my dead parents and my dead sisters, and I couldn't take the throne even if I wanted it.” His eyes grew glossy, and his voice sharpened to a bite.  
  
Roth blinked, tempted to ask about the plural _sisters_ , Saul's use of which contradicted everything the HoloNet said. “Why not?” he asked instead.  
  
“I'm not a woman. Besides, every noble house will be pining for it by now,” Saul told them, looking away from them and focusing his attention on a far-off corner of the hangar, just beyond the ship. He swallowed hard past a thick lump at the top of his throat. “Breha will probably get it, but even then . . .” His voice trailed off.  
  
Doja sighed, pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead. “Kriff. Let's just get this going, huh? No blood, you hear me? Not on my hands, on my ship, in this hangar, nowhere. You're not dying, kid, not on my watch. If you _do_ die, it'll be because I've sold you to pirates as a last resort, 'kay?” Saul didn't acknowledge her. “Already got too much of our voices on this thing already; gonna have a hell of a time editing that shit out. Let's go, Highness.”  
  
Saul slowly raised his head toward the recorder's lens, obediently enduring the incessant blinking of the recording light as Doja made a vague hand signal, telling him to start. He opened his mouth as he called to memory the gist of what Doja had wanted him to say. His tongue felt dry and too big. The rebelliousness in his voice had faded, thinned out to a matte hollowness. “My name is Saul Seeker. I'm the son of Queen Tura Ta'Shi Seeker of Alderaan, and I'm being held against my will for a sum of three million Republic credits, to be paid in less than three standard days by Bail Organa, Viceroy and First Chairman of Alderaan.” Doja was almost pleased with how mechanically the words came out, giving the emotional effect that the prince had undergone some manner of torment at his captors' hands—in her eyes, at least. Anyone outside of her own head—namely, perhaps, the recipients of the holo—would have readily attributed the strain to his voice to the events _preceding_ Kattada. “If you don't provide three million Republic credits within the next three days, Viceroy, I will be killed.” He took a long pause to breathe, the glossiness returning to his eyes and pooling at the corners. “Please.”  
  
Saul looked away from the lens, exhaling heavily. Doja turned off the recorder, a slight smile advancing across her face. “ _Aa_ nd cut,” she said. “See? Wasn't that easy?”  
  
Roth rolled his eyes, and the sibling bickering that followed was drowned out by Saul's own thoughts. Doja was a determined enough person to find some way, somehow, to get that holo to Bail Organa—that much Saul had learned from his limited time in her company. And once she did, Bail would exchange three million credits for his late friend's son in a heartbeat, because that was the kind of man he was. Breha would practically race him to it, because that was the kind of woman she was. The Organas had been Saul, Jemmila, and Rosalie's surrogate aunt and uncle for as long as the three could remember, nearly as constant a presence in their lives as their own parents. Marich Seeker was one of Bail's dearest friends, and the life of Marich's son would therefore be priceless to him. He would probably hand over his titles and estate to see Saul safely at home again.  
  
The warmth spreading through Saul's heart at the thought of it was enough to tell him that he couldn't go back. The man who had driven him out of his home and sent him running was still out there, somewhere. The bright red of his hair in the moonlight slashed across Saul's mind's eye, in-between black cloth. He couldn't go back there, where the HoloNet News would put him on display for the galaxy to see—for _him_ to see. The thought of home made his heart ache, made him long to just set foot on Aldera's pearlescent streets and taste warm custard bread, to smell Jemmila's paints mixing with the warm wax aroma of plain candles late at night. But Bail and Breha would take him in, heal his wounds better than Doja or Roth could, and initiate galaxywide manhunts for whomever had left him orphaned and an only child—all to be killed themselves. Saul had gotten away by the grace of all the gods of all the religions spread across the galaxy, the deep gashes in his skin a sugar-dusted alternative to his intended end. That man had wanted to kill him; what would stop him from coming back to try again?  
  
The first time had been easy enough, and coming back to finish the job with a couple of added tally marks would be nothing hard-fought.  
  
Saul's chest heaved with the weight of the decision before him. The blaster pocketed from the tiny house outside hadn't left his possession through the night and morning both, and it poked hard into the small of his back as he blinked his watery eyes at the two dark-haired figures before him. He wasn't a worry to them; they had gotten their shot.  
  
Saul slowly leaned forward and reached his right hand behind his back, fumbling around for a second before grasping hold of the blaster's slim handle. He found his palms suddenly clammy and he fought to keep his grip steady as he looked between Roth and Doja, whose words blended together in a grating series of sandpaper syllables. He swallowed hard, reminding himself that the weapon had already been set to STUN.  
  
His eyes landed on Roth as he raised the blaster up, finger on the trigger. It gave more resistance than he thought it would, giving him half a second more time to reconsider, to second-guess. Just when Saul thought he wouldn't be able to do it, that he was weakened enough that a blaster trigger would best him, he felt it give another centimeter and felt a hard jerk course up through his arm and shoulder as the shot racked his inexperienced frame. A blinding bolt of plasma flashed through the air and slammed Roth to the floor, landing flat on his back with a hard thud. Saul sucked in a breath, bouncing up to his feet and letting the blaster hang by his side as both he and Doja marveled in wide-eyed surprise.  
  
The woman's tight ponytail whipped around hard as she turned to Saul, eyes flickering from him to his inexplicably acquired weapon and back to her brother, limp and motionless on the floor. From where she stood, she couldn't see any blaster bolt holes or black residue on his clothes where the harsh flash of red-tinged light had hit him. Looking a second longer, she saw him inhale, and let out a breath of relief herself. Angrily, teeth bore, she turned back to Saul and took off in a sprint toward him, slamming her shoulder hard into his chest just as he jerkily rose the blaster to meet her.  
  
The blaster clattered to the floor, flying from Saul's hand as he tumbled to the floor with Doja on top of him. His breath left him for a moment, his awareness shaken off-balance and a sharp sting spidering through his left shoulder blade, and extending oddly to his right cheek bone. He shortly realized that Doja had punched him, and had risen her fist to bear down upon him again. Saul moved his head out of the way, swinging his shoulder into Doja's abdomen and throwing her off of him. He found perplexing strength in the adrenalin that came with the fall and the hard hit to his bandaged face. The contact stimulated the injury beneath a thin piece of gauze and drew a small amount of fresh blood—just enough for Saul to notice as it wet the fabric. He breathed sharply through his teeth, scrambling to find the blaster as curly strands of his unwashed hair fell into his eyes.  
  
A glint of metallic sheen came into view, and Saul lunged for it. Doja's weight came down upon his back and slammed his chest into the cold floor, eliciting a pained groan from deep in his diaphragm. His fingers just brushed the blaster's muzzle, the cuts across his hands stretching painfully as he reached hard.  
  
“What the kriff do you think you're doing?” Doja yelled, pressing her forearm onto Saul's neck and digging her knee into his back just above his kidney. “Where the hell did you get that?”  
  
Without answering, Saul threw his weight over and rolled onto his back, lying on top of Doja as she wrapped her arm around his neck tight. Saul butted his head back and winced as he heard the crack of cartilage in Doja's nose, accompanied by her guttural cry of pain. The ill-executed hold on Saul's neck loosened. He squirmed away from her and finally grabbed hold of the blaster, pushing himself up to his feet and turning to face her, armed and at the ready, just as she, too, hoisted herself up.  
  
Saul squeezed the trigger, cementing his stance this time to steel his muscles against the kick-back. Another bolt of plasma shot out and connected with Doja's abdomen, sending her to the floor on her side, her arms splayed out in either direction. Saul exhaled a long, uneven breath, slowly growing more aware of the pain in his back and his head as he breathed in and out, walking around an unconscious Doja to lean on the chair for support. The blinking recording light of the holorecorder persisted, and he looked into the lens for a long moment. He looked down at Roth, still out cold, then back to the recorder. The adrenalin hadn't yet faded, and with a quickness in his step Saul rounded the holorecorder's stand and put the blaster back in the waistband of his trousers. He fiddled around with the controls until he found what could reasonably be the eject button for the data chip. Once he pressed it, the recording light stopped blinking and a black rectangle with angled gray markings popped halfway out of a small port in the side of the device. He pulled it out the rest of the way and slid it in the front pocket of his trousers.  
  
Saul hadn't realized how hard he had been breathing until he moved the blaster to a more comfortable place in an inside pocket of his jacket, seeing and feeling the heaving of his chest. He placed a hand over his chest and rubbed the pads of his fingers into the spaces between ribs, looking between Doja's and Roth's fallen figures. The soles of his feet itched with the urge to run, his knees and calves tensing as he pivoted around. The _Red Star_ stood stockily and unimpressive by the huge hangar doors—which Doja had closed for the purpose of getting just the right lighting for the ransom holo.  
  
Saul's feet moved faster than they had since he stumbled into the Aldera spaceport, his long legs making great strides past the plain freighter. His eyes locked on the panel he had seen Doja peer at and press a single button on to close the hangar doors. Feeling a coursing, hurried urge, Saul braced his hand on the wall beside the panel to stop himself, leaning down and running the tips of his fingers down over the buttons, searching for the right one. Near the top left of the panel, a conspicuous red button, circular and raised farther than the rest, glowed faintly. It was soft and pliable when Saul pressed his thumb into it, and it turned green in sync with the shifting pistons behind the walls, and the pained groan of the doors as they eased open. Daylight spilled across Saul's shoes and raised up along his legs as wind slapped his jacket against his person. The tangled curls of his hair whipped around his head as the strong cliffside wind forced him slightly backward before he steadied himself. It had been slightly breezy the day before, but now there were hints of a coming storm not only in the gusting wind, but in the form of gray clouds clustering along the verdant horizon.  
  
Saul turned and rounded the ship, catching sight of Doja's ponytail flipping over her face in the breeze. By the time the wind reached the back of the hangar, it wasn't as strong. It certainly wouldn't wake them before Saul could carry out an escape—or so he had to assure himself, panic pooling inside his chest cavity as he saw the air agitate their hair and clothes.  
  
Saul's feet found the base of the open boarding ramp before he was fully aware he was moving again, the fight to evaporate the clouds in his head a losing battle as he struggled to comprehend what he had decided to do.  
  
The still air inside the ship gave him more room to think and to breathe. He found the switch to shut the boarding ramp and slammed it with the heel of his hand. He made his way to the cockpit, urgently calling to mind his pilot training as he sat down in the captain's chair and fumbled around for the switch to ignite the freighter's engines. He slid on the stiff leathery fabric of the seat, so before even touching the control yoke he planted his feet hard on the deck and pulled the chair's outdated crash webbing around his torso. _Better than nothing_.  
  
Saul swallowed hard on a dry throat as faint rumbles of engines warming vibrated through the bones of his feet and ankles. For the first time, he raised his eyes to look through the spanning transparisteel canopy. Outside it was a beautiful sunny afternoon, Quellor's landscape abundant with a million shades of green. Against the rich blue sky were those encroaching stormclouds, creeping farther into view every second, heavy with the threat of rain. In that quiet moment, waiting for a signal that the ship was ready to fly, Saul had a shaking thought: _Where am I going?_  
  
Saul leaned back in the captain's chair just enough to touch his shoulder blades to its support, chapped lips falling open less than a centimeter as he wondered just where he planned to run to this time. He wanted to think that it didn't matter; to a certain extent, he had a ship of his own now. He could go wherever he wanted—fly off into Wild Space if he wanted to, and let the freighter run out of fuel, let the cold of space overtake his body or let pirates kill him and ravage the ship. It would make no difference: to everyone back home, he was as good as dead, anyway—especially now that Doja's plan had been cut short.  
  
A coolness washed over him as he pondered on those thoughts. Not a feeling of resolve and acceptance of suicide, but one that livened his senses and pointed his nerves on end, that shot his hands to the buckle of the crash webbing and unfastened himself from its clutches. Saul leaned forward to a small screen he found familiar in design and coordination to the previous ships he had flown. Hitting a button beside it, the screen lit up and displayed a selection of coordinates stored within the ship's memory banks. _I can go anywhere. As far as the fuel reserves take me. I can go anywhere._  
  
He licked his lips as he scrolled through the numbers, eyes brightening in contrast to their dark circles as the infectious sensation of freedom invaded his mind. It was a twisted kind of freedom, stolen and borne of tragedy that weighed down his entire body and drew his long face out sallow and sunken. But it was _freedom_ , the binds of his shortlived captivity brought upon by his own ignorance and blind trust gone, broken and lying at his feet.  
  
Saul selected the coordinates farthest from Quellor as possible. Skirting along the edge of the Outer Rim: Tatooine, Arkanis Sector. The prince swallowed hard, tapping his finger on the coordinates and bringing up a page in glowing white Basic Aurebesh characters of Tatooine's planetary details. A thumbnail image of the Tatoo System sat to the right of the bullet points and short paragraphs, a view of the arid desert world and its twin suns against a backdrop of star-dappled space. Saul pressed a button beside the screen to enter those coordinates into the navicomputer, and a series of blips and chirps confirmed the action.  
  
Saul had hidden away from home before, when he and his twin's lives were in danger and showing their faces anywhere near the Inner Rim would ensure another vicious attempt to kill them both. But back then he had had Jemmila by his side, to be the reassurance he so often needed, the rock to hold him down. Then, they both knew it wouldn't be forever, that they would see Alderaan's sharp snow-peaked mountains and thick evergreen forests again, sleep in their own beds again, be safe again. Taste Alderaani wine at special gatherings again, smell blooming gingerbells and ladalums again, buy Rosalie new additions to her collection of wishing stones at bustling, vibrant markets again.  
  
He didn't notice the wetness on his cheeks as he once again pulled the crash webbing over his torso, nor the shakiness of the breath he took when he set his hands, stiff with dried bacta and gauze, around the yoke. The repulsorlifts raised the ship up from the hangar floor at Saul's command, and he carefully eased the craft through the gaping entrance, the sinking feeling of no solid ground beneath his feet serving to once again invigorate his senses. Tilting the ship up and increasing speed, Saul's heart beat hard and fast, thumping against the inside of his chest like a rabbit's foot. As the view before him progressively turned from blue to blue-gray to black, awash with pinpricks of white stars, Saul reached one hand to prep the ship for a jump to lightspeed. He had only done such a thing two or three times before, and each time he had someone else there coaching him through it. It was tricky to correlate the lessons learned in other models and classes of ships to the _Red Star_ , but the differences weren't too vast for him to get the hang of.  
  
As the ship primed itself for the jump, Saul stared out into the endless expanse of space before him. It made him dizzy, as it always had. Both Jemmila and Rosalie were enchanted by the view of space, fascinated by the swirling, smoky colors of nebulae and hard-pressed to tear themselves away from a good look at the magic of the vastness between worlds. Saul had always been different. Space didn't scare him, but it threw him off-kilter, made him feel just uneasy enough to be keenly aware of its nothingness at the edge of his consciousness. Jem and Rose never thought of it as nothing.  
  
“How can you call that many stars nothing?” Jem had asked him once, awake long past their bedtime on a trip to Coruscant.  
  
He still didn't have an answer for her.


	10. Saul

Saul sat in the _Red Star_ 's cockpit for a long time, silent and contemplative, the idle starship engine humming beneath his feet. He knew he could only stay within the cooled interior of the ship for so long before he had to brave the scorching heat of Tatooine's surface. He didn't know how quickly or how slowly he had gotten there; minutes and hours had long since blended together, and he had no way of telling the length of the periods of sometimes dreamless, sometimes nightmarish sleep he found in the captain's chair, waking up to streaking blue, confused and dazed for a few seconds before he came to the sinking realization of where he was.  
  
He had used the shower in the refresher, using a hefty amount of the freighter's on-board water supply to scrub the blood, dirt, and oil from his hair and body. When he looked in the mirror and pushed the wet black strands from his face, Saul was both surprised and underwhelmed at his appearance; his eyes were sunken in, deeply shaded upside-down crescents beneath them; his lips were pale; his cheeks looked hollowed out; the tender cuts along his face were deep red and rough to the touch, no longer bleeding. Seeing them uncovered made his stomach clench hard, and he moved to lean over the toilet just as the feeling began to fade away. He shaved with supplies he found in the cabinets inlaid in the bulkhead, finding no cream and substituting thin suds from the hand soap, poorly avoiding the skinny cuts as he went. He disliked growing out what minuscule facial hair he had begun to develop, and seeing himself without it again made him feel—in the slightest sense—more normal.  
  
Saul had also cleaned what he could from his neutrally colored stable clothes. He hadn't been wearing anything white that night, so the blood that caked around the hole in the knee of his trousers, as well as whatever had gotten on the sleeves of his jacket, washed out easily enough. He did it all with mechanical detachment, willing himself not to think on the circumstances behind the stains.  
  
He sat forward in the captain's chair, focusing on the rough tan wall of the docking bay outside the viewport. He ran his hand through his half-dried hair, already forming into tight curls. The cuts along the insides of his knuckles had, too, healed to a point where they no longer needed to be covered, but were still sensitive and stung at a hard enough touch. He absentmindedly ran the pad of his thumb across one of them, feeling the ridges, breathing hard and slow through a tightness in his throat.  
  
Finally, Saul stood, turning off the stolen ship's engine. He hadn't quite given much thought to the fact that he was a criminal now, too. A thief. Perhaps stealing the ship could have qualified as a very specific definition of self-defense, but the medium-sized satchel, made from faded brown-red leather that had once been supple and valuable, fashioned with matte black buckles and a long shoulder strap of slightly lighter-colored leather, solidified his status as a thief. He had found it empty in a storage compartment, and inside of it now was what he could scavenge from Doja and Roth's supplies, what would be useful to him that he could carry in the satchel. Toiletries, first-aid items, nonperishable rations, unopened water bottles made of thick, insulated tin, the datapad left unattended on a desk in the bunkroom—which Saul had used as a research tool for the world he was headed for. The siblings were good at keeping the majority of their credits on their persons, but Saul found a small cache in a bulkhead cabinet: eleven ten-credit pieces.  
  
The mechanical motions with which he carried out this task, as well, helped distract him from the inevitability of having nothing to call his own but what he could fit in that bag. The money he could get for the freighter might be enough to find a place to stay, but Saul didn't know for sure. Alderaan was a luxurious planet, fostering a largely wealthy population, and therefore steep prices for just about everything in comparison to other planets. Tatooine, he could only assume, would be on the lower end of that scale.  
Saul pulled the satchel over his head and rested it across his torso, its weight settling against his hip. He didn't recognize that he was holding his breath until he began to walk to the open boarding ramp. The harsh light of the Tatooine late morning flooded into the entrance corridor. A sharp, panging sense of unfamiliarity cinched around Saul's heart, and as he stepped out into the brightness of the binary suns, he felt very, very young.  
  
It felt like the air was taken from his lungs all at once, and he coughed as he inhaled what felt like pure heat devoid of any air at all. After a moment, he regained his bearings, breathing shallowly, and held up a hand against the suns hanging in the bright blue sky. His hand cast a narrow sliver of shade over his unaccustomed eyes, and he blinked at the entrance to the main hallway of the Bestine Spaceport. The soles of his boots crunched down upon fine particles of sand, loose from the hard-packed granules that made up the floor, as he started walking on questionably steady legs, more so feeling a breeze against his face than his own muscles moving.  
  
“Hey!” a burly voice called out to him.  
  
Saul jumped, whipping his head around to the source of the voice. He had inhaled sharply and felt grains of sand on his tongue as a result. The voice had belonged to an Askajian man, who was walking toward Saul with a business-like gait about his short, wide legs. The skin on his face was heavily pockmarked and sun-damaged, his low-hanging jowls like strips of leather hide. His rounded head—which only reached just below Saul's shoulder—was capped with thick, wiry black hair cut short and sharply.  
  
Saul's heart beat didn't slow with the amicable half-smile the Askajian gave him. He was poised on the blades of his feet, ready to dash away to the exit. When he tried to think of a reason why, he couldn't muster one.  
  
“This your ship, boy?” the plump man asked, his form swollen with recently restored epidermal sacs his species used for water storage. He jerked a thumb toward the freighter, and Saul looked between him and the ship questioningly.  
  
“Yes,” he said, tentative. He could already feel sweat dot along his back and neck.  
  
“Really,” the Askajian said, incredulous. He narrowed his squinted brown eyes, looking Saul's slender body up and down. In the days since Alderaan, stress had eaten away enough of Saul's weight so that his clothes wore him. To the desert-dweller, it looked simply strange to see a boy so scrawny and so young flying alone. If he noticed the unsightly cuts along Saul's face, he didn't look on them for too long. “You don't got anybody else with you? Co-pilot?”  
  
His accent was stiff and sharp with an Outer Rim twinge, which contrasted with Saul's polished intonation almost comically. “No,” Saul said, starting to feel defensive. “I came here by myself.”  
  
The Askajian harrumphed, dropping the subject. Stranger beings had flown into Bestine. “All right, then. I'm here to collect your docking fee.”  
  
Saul's eyebrows perked in recognition. The individual over the subspace radio had said something about that, the details of which Saul couldn't readily remember. “Okay,” he stammered. “How much?” He reached into the satchel, feeling around for the smooth credit ingots.  
  
“How long're you planning on staying?” The Askajian set his arms akimbo, thick thumbs hooking onto his belt.  
  
Saul glanced at him, clandestinely looking for an identification tag before remembering where he was. “Erm—” He paused, his fingers around two or three ingots, struggling to find an appropriate answer as he blinked at the dark insides of the bag. “I don't know. I'm going to sell it, though. The ship.”  
  
The man made a wordless noise of remark deep in his throat, peering at Saul from beneath bushy eyebrows with a quizzical air that made him uncomfortable. “So, you're plannin' to stick around for a long time, then.”  
  
Saul shuffled his feet just so, kicking up a shallow, fleeting cloud of dust around them. “I guess so.” His tongue felt too big for his mouth, and he felt his youth like an unbearable weight upon his chest as the urge to cry stuffed his nose and made the corners of his eyes tingle.  
  
“You _guess_ so!” The Askajian's girth jiggled with a deprecating laugh. “Boy, this ship ain't worth enough to buy another that'll get you past the Mid Rim.”  
  
Saul set his jaw, looking up at the freighter incredulously. He flickered his eyes back down to the man, squinting at the light reflected off of the sand floor. He waited a moment to speak, making sure he could trust his voice. “I guess I won't be going to the Mid Rim, then.”  
  
The finality of his retort struck him, and he swayed slightly in place, the heat beating down upon his uncovered head and making it worse. _Once I sell the ship, I'll probably never leave this planet again._  
  
The Askajian snorted. “I'll give you nine thousand for it,” he offered, shrugging one large shoulder.  
  
Saul paused, his fingers closing around two credit ingots. He might have considered once before, but as it stood he was hesitant to accept the first offer bestowed upon him. “No, thank you.” Saul didn't have the energy to mention how unimpressed with the vessel this man had been just a minute ago, and now he wanted to buy it for himself. Perhaps it was just a Tatooine custom, making an offer on a ship when you hear it's for sale, akin to _how are you?_. “How much to dock it for one day?” Optimistically, that would be all he needed.  
  
Saul had considered, albeit briefly, sleeping a night in Bestine before going anywhere else, but the feeling of confinement on-board a starship had instilled an eagerness to move within him, and he didn't want to stay in a place he knew he wouldn't remain for any longer than necessary.  
  
The Askajian eyed him for a couple of long moments, not offended that the boy turned down his offer so readily but slightly jaded that he didn't even consider it. “Gimme fifty.” He waved his hand out, wrapped palm up. “Sure you don't wanna pay for a couple extra days, case you can't sell the thing?”  
  
Saul handed him the credits, placing them neatly upon his palm. “One day will be fine. Thank you.”  
  
The man harrumphed once more, pinching the credit ingots and nonchalantly biting down upon their corners. Saul blinked, feeling an itch at the soles of his feet. He nodded once at the Askajian out of ingrained formality, forcing his near-numb legs to move his body forward. His knees felt oddly stiff.  
  
“Hey,” that same gruff call came again, making Saul stop short of the entrance to the spaceport's main hallway. He turned halfway, squinting to make out the wide form past the brightness. “Humor me, kid. Outta curiosity, the hell are you doing here?”  
  
Saul was hot, and exhausted from the sun and his lungs' hard-fought process of the blistering, dry air. He angled his head down, a bone-dry curl of black hair falling in his line of sight. He decided, feeling resolute and rebellious, that he didn't have to explain himself to the Askajian. He didn't have to explain himself to anyone. The tragedy that pushed him to the Outer Rim was nobody's business but his own, and it would remain locked away in his heart for as long as he could keep it there.  
  
Saul chewed hard on the inside of his cheek, turning away and walking from the docking bay without a word.

* * *

Within the shade of indoors, it was slightly more bearable. Saul felt conspicuous at first, among the throng of Humans and non-Humans, suited to their teeth in spacer garb and various types of armor, some members of species Saul had never seen in person before, or even knew existed. He felt too clean, not so much physically but in how he walked with a straighter posture than everyone around him, how he politely nodded by rote to a Rodian who bumped into his shoulder in a particularly congested corridor. He felt like he should be grittier, tougher, more surly to blend in. As he went, though, he gradually grew more aware of the tightness of the skin around his cuts, and how it hurt to flex almost any of his facial muscles. Remembering how he had looked in the mirror, clean-shaven now but marred all the same, he felt all the more camouflaged among the ruffians.  
  
In the Bestine Spaceport there were several types of beings, the most prevalent of which being hard-muscled and stern-faced spacers, blasters strapped to their thighs, the outlines of hidden vibroblades in their pockets, looking to get their hands dirty in nefarious businesses Saul declined to think on. One of the smallest minorities of beings within the spaceport were hagglers, trickling in from the sun-baked streets outside, calling out offers of buying or selling. Most ignored them, but Saul loaned his ear. Here, his studies of the Huttese language came in handy. It was rusty at first, but hearing the predominantly Huttese chatter and clamor around him, the words returned steadily.  
  
The first he encountered—a Rodian—gruffly declined to buy the ship, for he was only offering to sell small, spare parts _for_ ships, and lacked the currency necessary to purchase a freighter, anyway. The second, a deeply tanned Human or near-Human woman with skin akin to leather from sun exposure, thought hard for a long moment and said she would have to see it first. Saul showed her the _Red Star_ —all the while curious if the prying Askajian would still be around—and waited with agonizing patience as she looked inside; she had made a point of wanting to explore the ship alone, preferring to be unburdened by a salesman when she inspected wares. She gave off an air of experience that told Saul she could do whatever she pleased. Her name was Hala.  
  
“The thing's old,” she had told him in Basic, emerging from the ship, holding her shapeless robes above her ankles. “Not too old, though. Somebody'll buy it for a good price. Means I'll have to give you a less-than-good price, though.”  
  
Saul shrugged, telling her in polite words that he didn't care how much she gave him. He couldn't have cared less what it would be upsold for, only that he could soon get out of the sun again. She wound up giving him thirteen thousand for it, sensing his urgency and perhaps going a bit lower than she could have been haggled for. Saul felt the heaviness of his satchel after the addition of the sacks of credits, and felt slightly more anchored in place, like he wouldn't be blown away by the first gust of wind that hit him.  
  
The woman advised him to buy a wrap for his head, so his brain wouldn't bake while he went wherever he was going. In response, Saul asked her where she suggested he go, if there was anywhere less busy and bustling than Tatooine.  
  
“Pika Oasis,” Hala told him, pointing a sun-spotted finger somewhere between his chest and neck. “Little-known gem, not a day's ride across the Jundland Wastes.”  
  
“An oasis? Here?” Saul asked.  
  
The woman laughed, a dry, crackly sound. “The _oasis_ is Dannar's Claim. When you find a pond on Tatooine bigger than a raindrop, let me know. I'd love to take a swim.”  
She offered no further explanation on either Dannar's Claim or the Jundland Wastes, but Saul felt too drained to ask about either. She did, however, tell him to buy a blaster and an eopie and ride southwest until he hit a town, and to pay extra for plenty of full canteens.  
  
“The blaster's for the Sand People,” Hala had told him. “Don't know if they'll be too active in Jundland this time of year, but they'll probably leave you alone if you don't look like you're carrying much.”  
  
All these terms for things he didn't know, with no explanation for what they meant. This new vocabulary dropped on his lap, the realization trickled into Saul's mind, slow as molasses, that he was an outsider through and through, a tourist with no idea. _Sand People_ sounded like something out of a children's cautionary tale, ominous and sticking to the back of his mind like a paste.  
  
It was a blur after that, Saul's mind a singular track to getting out of the spaceport. He made a list of goals in his head: get a wrap, get an eopie, get to Pika Oasis. Those three goals, simple and clean, were enough to keep him walking steadily, thinking only on keeping sand out of his eyes and mouth and bumping into as few shoulders as possible as he got to the next destination. Stepping out into Bestine in earnest was like a sunburst around him, the choppy tongue of Huttese thrown around in guttural commands and rebukes to unseen recipients, the odd Basic sentence or phrase mixed in here and there. Outside, the suns' heat bore down upon him like a physical weight, sweat rapidly forming around his hairline and causing the inner layers of his clothes to stick to his skin. He had already been wearing clothes somewhat unconventional for an Alderaani Prince, the color palette lacking white or pastels of any sort; the darkness of the stable clothes insulated the heat, and he felt it harshly. He thought about adding _buy new clothes_ to his list of objectives, but the thought dissolved as his eyes adjusted to the brightness, and he took in his surroundings. That could wait until Pika Oasis.  
  
A million shades of tan, some redder, some more brown, an ochre rainbow with accents of gray-black soot lay out before him, like a painting made with clay and water mixed together. Bestine was mostly made up of squat sandstone structures with smooth domed roofs and no windows. There were few buildings taller than the spaceport; even the tallest tower in the city didn't reach far above its rooftop. The sand that made up the streets was hard-packed and didn't kick up as easily as that in docking bays, product of being trod upon endlessly by thousands of beings everyday. Saul added his footprints to those of the masses in outwardly assured steps, the structure of his skeleton made to feel more secure by his goal of obtaining a wrap for his head.  
  
It didn't take long to find a merchant stall that sold them, long and wide strips of fabric knotted around the wooden framework of the stall, flapping gently in the breeze. Saul purchased one of rough-spun gray material. As he held the wrap in his hands, he noted the pain about the cuts across his knuckles, fine granules of sand getting into and irritating them.  
  
“I'll take these, too,” he told the Basic-speaking merchant, holding up a pair of fingerless gloves, made from the same fabric as the wrap. The seems were beautifully sewn and the finger holes snug, ideal for keeping out sand. He assumed that most of the garments he would encounter here were, indeed, manufactured to keep out pestering sand. He had thought before that extra coverings on a planet like this would be detrimental, but once his face was tucked away in the shade of his cowl, and the dorsals and palms of his hands protected, he was thankful for them. Hardly a fashionably conscious young man, Saul didn't concern himself with the mismatch of these Tatooinian pieces and his fine Alderaani clothes, instead musing upon how Jemmila would have fussed over finding new clothes to match as soon as possible, taking after their father in always coming forward with a strong wardrobe to match her strong front.  
  
Saul would have given the thought a chuckle, maybe even a grin, had it been any other day.

* * *

The ache of the loss of his twin twisted hard into a place beneath Saul's solar plexus as he chose an eopie from the only stable in Bestine, his new barriers against the heat providing no protection against the uninvited intrusion of memory. The animal of burden, equipped with a high saddle and specially-paid-for canteens of water, its long-snouted face looking at Saul lastingly, with an irritation coming naturally to its wrinkled eyes, reminded him less of his own horses and more of Jemmila's thranta. They let her ride all of them, but the one she loved most was a pale lavender creature with intelligent dark eyes, and a coned face that seemed to smile at her. Saul had never believed her, but she always insisted, the line between whimsy and genuineness blurring in her tone.  
  
Saul was not wont to subscribe to superstition or religion, or anything beyond a certain level of abstract, but he believed in the invisible link he shared with Jem. It was just beyond his ability of explanation, the taut, unbreakable cord tied around either of their beating hearts, connecting them. She had felt it, too. They had shared a womb and they shared a world, two halves of a coin minted in scintillating chalcedony. Jemmila was raised knowing she would be queen one day, and looked to that eventual duty with a full heart of expectation and determination, arms open in both distribution of her love for her people and reciprocation of their love for her. Saul, on the other hand, was raised to be an exemplary prince and role model all the same, but knew he would never rise to the ultimate position of power and responsibility. He was okay with that—perfectly thrilled, in fact. He would rather hide away in his stables all day, brushing tangles out of long lustrous manes and feeding treats of fruit to wide, toothy mouths, than speak to fussy diplomats all day; he would rather spend his time baking or blending teas than settling treaties or dividing resources.  
  
But that was how they fit, two puzzle pieces snugly intertwined.  
  
Now, however, the cord connecting their hearts had snapped and broken when one of them stopped beating. Frayed, dragging in the sand alongside Saul's boots, the cord hung limp. Without the anchor of Jemmila on the other end Saul's heart swayed and wandered, as though it were weightless in his chest and unbound by gravity, bumping against the inside of his chest cavity. It felt lost, destined to remain featherlight and buoyant.  
  
Saul led the eopie by its reins to a small shop recommended by the stable owner—a sharply spoken and mildly disconcerting Toydarian—after Saul informed him of his destination. Saul already had supplies in the satchel—which he had secured to the eopie's side to free his own shoulder of the weight—but decided to bulk up his rations in case the exertion of existing in the desert heat made him hungry. He was almost reluctant to leave the bustling society of the small city, its inhabitants hardened and dangerous to look at for too long, but other living beings all the same. He had a feeling that, across the expanse of the Jundland Wastes he was to traverse, the solitude of it would be deafening.  
  
After purchasing a nondescript, small-sized blaster based solely upon the recommendation of the shopkeeper—and a matching thigh holster, at a marginal discount—Saul dawdled and picked up a thick oval of transparent turquoise glitterglass, smooth and without flaw, with a band of reflective silver metal around the edges and a dip in the center just the right size for the pad of his thumb. Beside it on the shelf was a canvas container of tens more, all different colors. The worry stones sparkled enchantingly in the light that spilled in through the shop's opening. Saul was almost decided on the turquoise one, until the stones colored pale violet caught his eye. He picked up the darkest one between his index finger and thumb, only a few shades darker than its pastel counterparts, and watched it twinkle.

* * *

It took a while to get used to the eopie's high-perched saddle, especially considering Saul's own height, but the endless expanse of sand dunes and scorched flatlands baked to cracking laying out before him, like something out of a holodrama, was surreal enough to capture his immediate attention. The solid patter of the eopie's hooves upon the ground aligned just off-center with Saul's heartbeat, and, removed from Bestine's clamor, were the only two sounds the prince could hear above the distant desert winds. Distantly, he saw towering rock formations and mesas jutting up from the planet's crust. His lips parted and hung there for a short time, until he felt sand underneath his tongue.  
  
Saul felt a swell in his chest, an innate awe at the grandeur and beauty of the spanning, planet-sized desert. At the same time, as the eopie's lumbering steps developed a rhythm, he had to remind himself how truly treacherous the world of exile he had chosen was—that much he had learned from poring over Doja's datapad just before he left Bestine. There weren't many places on Tatooine krayt dragons didn't call home; Tusken Raiders, colloquially called Sand People, were primitive, brutal nomads, an unfathomable number of tribes always moving; Jawas would sooner scour Saul's person for valuables than point him in the right direction should he get lost. But the fear of Tatooine's dangers—even those most obvious, those anchored in its atmosphere—eluded him when he gazed out upon the horizon, so brilliantly different than anywhere he had ever been.  
  
Coming to the mouth of a long canyon, Saul felt a stab of discomfort on his hip. He shifted in the saddle and felt around in his pocket, finding the data chip, still stowed away from his escape from Quellor. He made the eopie stop, looking down at the chip long and hard, remembering sitting in the hard, uncomfortable chair, being scrutinized by the low-level criminals who wanted to sell him off, made to plead to Bail Organa for his life. It was all still there.  
  
Saul turned his head, looking toward the steep banks of sand collected along the canyon walls. He made a sharp throw, sending the chip through the air and clattering against the canyon's ochre-red wall. Its small black body tumbled into the sand, buried by the miniature sandslide its disturbance of the bank created. Saul breathed hard, and kept riding southwest.


End file.
